Long Distance Pronominalisation and Global Focus

Our corpus of descriptive text contains a significant number of long-distance pronominal references (8.4% of the total). In order to account for how these pronouns are intepreted, we re-examine Grosz and Sidner's theory of the attentional state, and in particular the use of the global focus to supplement centering theory. Our corpus evidence concerning these long-distance pronominal references, as well as studies of the use of descriptions, proper names and ambiguous uses of pronouns, lead us to conclude that a discourse focus stack mechanism of the type proposed by Sidner is essential to account for the use of these referring expressions. We suggest revising the Grosz & Sidner framework by allowing for the possibility that an entity in a focus space may have special status.

[1]  Barbara J. Grosz,et al.  Pronouns, Names, and the Centering of Attention in Discourse , 1993, Cogn. Sci..

[2]  Candace L. Sidner,et al.  Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse , 1986, CL.

[3]  F. Corblin,et al.  Discourse structure and anaphora: Barbara Fox, Written and conversational English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 173 pp. $34.50. , 1989 .

[4]  L SidnerCandace,et al.  Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse , 1986 .

[5]  Philip N. Johnson-Laird,et al.  Thinking; Readings in Cognitive Science , 1977 .

[6]  Julia Hirschberg,et al.  User Participation in the Reasoning Processes of Expert Systems , 1982, AAAI.

[7]  Renata Vieira,et al.  A Corpus-based Investigation of Definite Description Use , 1997, CL.

[8]  Jerry R. Hobbs.  Resolving pronoun references , 1986 .

[9]  Chris Brew,et al.  Lexical Clustering and Definite Description Interpretation , 1998 .

[10]  Candace L. Sidner,et al.  Towards a computational theory of definite anaphora comprehension in English discourse , 1979 .

[11]  Johanna D. Moore,et al.  Toward a Synthesis of Two Accounts of Discourse Structure , 1996, CL.

[12]  Barbara J. Grosz,et al.  The representation and use of focus in dialogue understanding. , 1977 .

[13]  Christine Eiser,et al.  Toward a Synthesis , 1985 .

[14]  H. H. Clark,et al.  In search of referents for nouns and pronouns , 1979 .

[15]  Udo Hahn,et al.  Centering in-the-Large: Computing Referential Discourse Segments , 1997, ACL.

[16]  Raymonde Guindon,et al.  Anaphora Resolution: Short-Term Memory and Focusing , 1985, ACL.

[17]  Chris Mellish,et al.  Dynamic Generation of Museum Web Pages: The Intelligent Labelling Explorer , 1997, Arch. Mus. Informatics.

[18]  Herbert H. Clark,et al.  Bridging , 1975, TINLAP.

[19]  Marilyn A. Walker,et al.  Limited Attention and Discourse Structure , 1995, CL.

[20]  Simone Teufel,et al.  Resolving bridging references in unrestricted text , 1997 .

[21]  William C. Mann,et al.  Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization , 1988 .

[22]  Scott Weinstein,et al.  Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse , 1995, CL.

[23]  Bonnie L. Webber,et al.  Structure and Ostension in the Interpretation of Discourse Deixis , 1991, ArXiv.

[24]  Johanna D. Moore,et al.  Planning Text for Advisory Dialogues: Capturing Intentional and Rhetorical Information , 1993, CL.