An exploratory study of the characteristics of chronic returnees to the rehabilitation and physical medicine department of the Massachusetts Memorial Hospitals

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Discourse cues: Further evidence for the core contributor distinction

Moser and Moore (1995, to appear) carried out a corpus study of discourse cues in tutorial dialogue. Their annotation uses Relational Discourse Analysis (RDA), which distinguishes core elements (nuclei-like) from contributors (satellite-like). In their discussion of these results, Moser and Moore propose that clauses in the contributor-core order are harder to understand than clauses in core-contributor order, but do not attempt to explain why the "hard'' order is ever used. Here, we recruit evidence from work by Stevenson and her collaborators, which substantiates the empirical claim. We then suggest that by distinguishing information structure (given-new) from intentional structure (core-contributor), wecan explain why hard orders are surprisingly frequent. We note, however, that this cannot be the whole story, and show how the hierarchical RDA structure helps account for differences between discourse cues such as since, so, this means, and therefore

More Well-Endowed Chairs

In the February 1976 issue of Word Ways, Philip Cohen presented a collection of aptly-endowed college chairs. We invite him to attend the spring convocation of Ourtown Vocational Junior College to learn of some truly remarkable affinities between the donors and the chairs that they have endowed

Temporal connectives in a discourse context

We examine the role of temporal connectives in multi-sentence discourse. In certain contexts, sentences containing temporal connectives that are equivalent in termporal structure can fail to be equivalent in terms of discourse coherence. We account for this by offering a novel, formal mechanism for accommodating the presuppositions in temporal subordinate clauses. This mechanism encompasses both accommodation by discourse attachment and accommodation by temporal addition. As such, it offers a precise and systematic model of interactions between presupposed material, discourse context, and the reader's background knowledge. We show how the resuits of accommodation help to determine a discourse's coherence

Evaluating Centering for Information Ordering Using Corpora

In this article we discuss several metrics of coherence defined using centering theory and investigate the usefulness of such metrics for information ordering in automatic text generation. We estimate empirically which is the most promising metric and how useful this metric is using a general methodology applied on several corpora. Our main result is that the simplest metric (which relies exclusively on NOCB transitions) sets a robust baseline that cannot be outperformed by other metrics which make use of additional centering-based features. This baseline can be used for the development of both text-to-text and concept-to-text generation systems. </jats:p

Preventing false temporal implicatures: interactive defaults for text generation

Introduction Given the causal and temporal relations between events in a knowledge base, what are the ways they can be described in text? Elsewhere, we have argued that during interpretation, the reader-hearer H must infer certain temporal information from knowledge about the world, language use and pragmatics. It is generally agreed that processes of Gricean implicature help determine the interpretation of text in context. But without a notion of logical consequence to underwrite them, the inferences---often defeasible in nature---will appear arbitrary, and unprincipled. Hence, we have explored the requirements on a formal model of temporal implicature, and outlined one possible nonmonotonic framework for discourse interpretation (Lascarides &amp; Asher [1991], Lascarides &amp; Oberlander [1992a]). Here, we argue that if the writer-speaker S is to tailor text to H , then discourse generation can be informed by a similar formal model o

Inferring discourse relations in context

We investigate various contextual effects on text interpretation, and account for them by providing contextual constraints in a logical theory of text interpretation. On the basis of the way these constraints interact with the other knowledge sources, we draw some general conclusions about the role of domain-specific information, top-down and bottom-up discourse information flow, and the usefulness of formalisation in discourse theory