Abstract
This paper explores the basis of discourse structure, cognitive mechanisms for recovering it, and computational algorithms designed to mimic human discourse structure recovery for text. We argue that structure is recovered to the extent that the reader can build a coherent cognitive model of the eventuality (situation) the discourse describes from the reader’s interpretation of the semantic content of the discourse. In empirical studies of newspaper commentary and narrative text we found that discourse structure is infrequently marked by cue phrases, and that paragraph shift, tense shift and focus shift do not add up to sufficient information for the location and recovery of discourse segment boundaries. A discourse theory which would rely solely upon these elements could not account for intuitions of discourse structure. In contrast, an adequate theory accounts for discourse in terms of coherence in addition to the above-mentioned elements. Asher (1993) and Asher and Kamp (1995) develop a similar theory.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Asher, N. 1993. Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. Norwell, MA: Kluwer.
Asher, N. and Kamp, H. 1995. Discourse Structure in the Service of Lexical Disambiguation. Ms in prep.
Cohen, R. 1984. A Computational Theory of the Function of Clue Words in Argument Understanding. Proceedings of the COLING-84 Conference, 251–258.
Dahlgren, K. 1985a. The Cognitive Structure of Social Categories. Cognitive Science 9, 379–398.
Dahlgren, K. 1988a Naive Semantics for Natural Language Understanding. Boston, MA: Kluwer.
Dahlgren, K. 1988b. Using Commonsense Knowledge to Disambiguate Word Senses. In P. St Dizier and V. Dahl (eds.), Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming 2. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Dahlgren, K. 1989. Coherence Relations and Naive Semantics. Paper given at the Symposium on Modelling Discourse Structure: Discourse Segments and Discourse Relations, University of Texas, Austin.
Dahlgren, K. 1990. Naive Semantics and Robust Natural Language Processing. Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium.
Dahlgren, K. 1991. The Autonomy of Shallow Lexical Knowledge. In J. Pustejovsky (ed), Knowledge Representation and Lexical Semantics. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Dahlgren, K. 1992. Convergent Evidence for a Set of Coherence Relations. In D. Stein (ed.), Cooperating with Written Texts. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dahlgren, K. 1993. A Linguistic Ontology. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Formal Ontology.
Dahlgren, K. 1994. Finding Relevant Texts. Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium, New Orleans.
Dahlgren, K. and J. McDowell. 1986a. Kind Types in Knowledge Representation. Proceedings of the COLING-8 Conference.
Dahlgren, K., J.P. McDowell, and E.P. Stabler, Jr. 1989. Knowledge Representation for Commonsense Reasoning with Text. Forthcoming in Computational Linguistics.
Davidson, D. 1967a. Causal Relations. Journal of Philosophy 64, 692–703.
Davidson, D. 1967b. The Logical Form of Action Sentences, in N. Rescher (ed.), The Logic of Action and Preference.
Decker, N. 1985. The Use of Syntactic Clues in Discourse Processing. Proceedings of the ACL-85 Conference.
Foss, D.J. 1988. Experimental Psycholinguistics. Annual Review of Psychology 30, 301–348.
Graesser, A. and L. Clark. 1985a Structure and Procedures of Implicit Knowledge. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Graesser, A. and L. Clark. 1985b. The Generation of Knowledge-Based Inferences during Narrative Comprehension. In G. Rickheit and H. Strohner (eds.), Inferences in Text Processing. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Grosz, B. and C. Sidner. 1986. Attention, Intensions and the Structure of Discourse: A Review. Computational Linguistics 7, 85–98;
Grosz, B. and C. Sidner. 1986. Attention, Intensions and the Structure of Discourse: A Review. Computational Linguistics 12, 175–204.
Hayes, P. J. 1985. The Second Naive Physics Manifesto. In J.R. Hobbs and R.C. Moore (eds.), Formal Theories of the Commonsense World. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Hinds, J. 1977. Paragraph Structure and Pronominalization. Papers in Linguistics 10(1–2), 77–99.
Hirst, G. 1981. Discourse-Oriented Anaphora Resolution: A Review. Computational Linguistics 7, 85–98.
Hobbs, J.R. 1979. Why is Discourse Coherent? SRI Technical Note #176.
Hobbs, J.R. 1985. On the Coherence and Structure of Discourse. CSLI Report #CSLI-85–37.
Holland D. and N. Quinn, eds. 1987. Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hovy, E.H. 1990. Parsimonious and Profligate Approaches to the Question of Discourse Structure Relations. Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Text Generation.
Johnson-Laird, P.N. 1983. Mental Models. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kamp, H. 1981. A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation. In J. Groenendijk, Th. Janssen, and M. Stokhof (eds.), Formal Methods in the Study of Language. Amsterdam: Mathematisch Centrum, 277–322.
Lakoff, G. 1985. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Mann, W.C. and S.A. Thompson. 1987. Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organization. ISI Reprint Series: ISI-RS-87–190.
Morrow, D.G, S.L. Greenspan, and G.H. Bower. 1987. Accessibility and Situation Models in Narrative Comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language 26, 165–187.
Partee, B. 1984. Nominal and Temporal Anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 7, 243–286.
Polanyi, L. 1988. A Formal Model of the Structure of Discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 12, 601–638.
Reichman-Adar, R. 1984 Technical Discourse: The Present Progressive Tense, The Deictic ‘That’ and Pronominalization. Discourse Processes 7, 337–369.
Reiter, R. 1980. A Logic for Default Reasoning. Artificial Intelligence 13, 81–132.
Rosch, E., C.B. Mervis, W.D. Gray, D.M. Johnson, and P. Boyes-Braem. 1976. Basic Objects in Natural Categories. Cognitive Psychology 8, 382–439.
Schubert, L. K., R.G. Goebel, and N.J. Cercone. 1979. The Structure and Organization of a Semantic Net for Comprehension and Inference. In N.V. Findler (ed.), Associative Networks. New York: Academic Press.
Smith, E.E. and D.L. Medin. 1981. Categories and Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Strawson, P.C. 1953. Individuals. London: Methuen.
Trabasso, T. and L.L. Sperry. 1985. Causal relatedness and the Importance of Story Events. Journal of Memory and Language 24, 595–611.
Trabasso, T., T. Secco, and P. van den Broek. 1983. Causal cohesion and story coherence. In H. Mandl, N.S. Stein and T. Trabasso (eds.), Learning and Comprehension of Text. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Van Dijk, T. and W. Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press.
Vendler, Z. 1967. Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Wada, H. 1994. A Treatment of Functional Definite Descriptions. Proceedings of the Coling-94 Conference.
Wilks, Y. 1975. Preference Semantics. In E. Keenan (ed.), Formal Semantics of Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dahlgren, K. (1996). Discourse Coherence and Segmentation. In: Hovy, E.H., Scott, D.R. (eds) Computational and Conversational Discourse. NATO ASI Series, vol 151. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03293-0_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03293-0_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-08244-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-03293-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive