Discourse Coherence and Segmentation
NATO ASI series. Series F : Computer and system sciencesPublished 1 January 1996
Kathleen Dahlgren
Citations5
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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.
Keywords
Computer Science
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