Discontinuities in narratives
Published 1 January 1988Open access
Alexander Nakhimovsky, William J. Rapaport
Citations9
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
Study Snapshot
ObjectiveStudy objective
MethodsResearch methodology
PopulationPopulation studied
Sample sizeSample sizes
OutcomesStudy outcomes here
ResultsStudy results comes here
LimitationsResearch study limitations comes here
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
This paper is concerned with heuristics for segmenting narratives into units that form the basic elements of discourse representations and the constrain the application of focusing algorithms.
Abstract
This paper is concerned with heuristics for segmenting narratives into units that form the basic elements of discourse representations and the constrain the application of focusing algorithms. The following classes of discontinuities are identified: figure-groud, space, time, perspective, and topic. It is suggested that rhetorical relations between narrative units are macro labels that stand for frequently occurring clusters of discontinuities. Heuristics for identifying discontinuities are presented and illustrated in an extended example.
Keywords
Computer Science
Scholarworks (University of Massachusetts Amherst)The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases
3,012 Citations1982Irene Heim
Computational LinguisticsAttention, intentions, and the structure of discourse
2,606 Citations1986Barbara J. Grosz, Candace L. Sidner
A new theory of discourse structure that stresses the role of purpose and processing in discourse is explored and various properties of discourse are described, and explanations for the behavior of cue phrases, referring expressions, and interruptions are explored.
Artificial IntelligenceTowards a general theory of action and time
2,562 Citations1984James F. Allen
A formalism for reasoning about actions that is based on a temporal logic allows a much wider range of actions to be described than with previous approaches such as the situation calculus and a framework for planning in a dynamic world with external events and multiple agents is suggested.
How Language Structures Space
1,556 Citations1983Léonard Talmy
This chapter is concerned with the structure that is ascribed to space and the objects within it by linguistic “fine structure,” that subdivision of language which provides a fundamental conceptual framework.
A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation
1,516 Citations2013Hans Kamp
The MIT Press eBooksNatural Language Understanding
1,279 Citations2021
The text features a new chapter on statistically-based methods using large corpora and an appendix on speech recognition and spoken language understanding and information on semantics that was covered in the first edition has been largely expanded in this edition.
Comparative LiteratureUnspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction
840 Citations1984Gerald Prince, Ann Banfield
A Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora
378 Citations2016Bonnie Webber
The view is that dealing with anaphoric language can be decomposed into two complementary tasks: identifying what a text potentially makes available for anaphor reference and how it does so and constraining the candidate set of a given anaphic expression down to one possible choice.
ScholarlyCommons (University of Pennsylvania)TENSE AS DISCOURSE ANAPHOR
236 Citations1988Bonnie Lynn Webber
Elsevier eBooksTHE SNePS SEMANTIC NETWORK PROCESSING SYSTEM
180 Citations1979Stuart C. Shapiro
This chapter describes the SNePS semantic network processing system, which is a direct descendent of MENTAL and is currently implemented in ALISP and runs interactively on the CDC CYBER 173 at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
SNePS Considered as a Fully Intensional Propositional Semantic Network
174 Citations1987Stuart C. Shapiro, William J. Rapaport
A formal syntax and semantics for SNePS considered as the (modeled) mind of a cognitive agent is presented, based on a Meinongian theory of the intensional objects of thought that is appropriate for AI considered as "computational philosophy" or "comPUTational psychology".
Elsevier eBooksPersistence, Intention, and Commitment
161 Citations1987Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque
Aspect, aspectual class, and the temporal structure of narrative
82 Citations1988Alexander Nakhimovsky
It is argued that an aspectual classification of situations evolving in time should be based on such considerations as the kinds of resources they consume and the goals they achieve.
The interpretation of tense in discourse
45 Citations1987Bonnie Webber
This paper gives an account of the role tense plays in the listener's reconstruction of the events and situations a speaker has chosen to describe and several new ideas are presented: that tense is better viewed by analogy with definite NPs than with pronouns.
A computational theory of perspective and reference in narrative
37 Citations1988Janyce Wiebe, William J. Rapaport
A discourse process that recognizes characters' thoughts and perceptions in third-person narrative and an algorithm that uses the results of the discourse process to understand references with respect to an appropriate set of beliefs is presented.
Reasoning about the temporal structure of narratives
31 Citations1987Michael Joseph Almeida
This dissertation concentrates on the study of issues involved in understanding the temporal structure of narratives, and describes the implementation of a parser which can read a narrative-line which includes frame adverbs and adverbials of duration.
Temporal reasoning in natural language understanding
11 Citations1987Alexander Nakhimovsky
The notions of temporal focus (proposed also in Webber (1987b)) and narrative move are introduced and the processing tasks involved in reconstructing the temporal structure of a narrative are formulated in terms of these two notions.