A Formal and Computational Synthesis of Grosz and Sidner ’ s and Mann and Thompson ’ s theories

In the last decade, members of the computational linguistics community have adopted a perspective on discourse based primarily on either Rhetorical Structure Theory or Grosz and Sidner’s Theory. However, only recently, researchers have started to investigate the relationship between the two perspectives. In this paper, we use Moser and Moore’s [1996] work as a departure point for extending our own formalization of RST [1996]. The result is a first-order axiomatization of the mathematical properties of text structures and of the relationship between the structure of text and intentions. The axiomatization enables one to use intentions for reducing the ambiguity of discourse and the structure of discourse for deriving intentional inferences.

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