Cogniac: a discourse processing engine

I fortunately had the pleasure of several friends unrelated Penn who entertained me at key points, bolstered waining self-esteem, and just plain dragged me away from my dissertation.

Abstract

COGNIAC: A DISCOURSE PROCESSING ENGINE Frederick Breckenridge Baldwin Aravind Joshi Ellen Prince In spoken and written language, anaphora occurs when one phrase points to another, where "points to" means that the two phrases denote the same thing in one's mind, as in the relationship between GREGOR SAMSA and he in the following: As GREGOR SAMSA awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. Kafka, The Metamorphosis. Much of the difficulty of developing a computer program to resolve anaphors amounts to picking the right antecedent when there are many to choose from. The dissertation describes an approach that is particularly suitable for applications that require large coverage and high accuracy. These results are achieved by endowing the system with the ability to notice that it cannot make a good choice in certain circumstances, coupled with simple and efficient language technologies to structure the prior discourse. The significan...