On the Role of Context in Relevance-Based Accessibility Ranking of Candidate Referents

It is now a standard view that candidate referents are ranked according to their accessibility, based on either or both of the discourse structure and organisation of general knowledge. Various models of reference resolution based on such a view, including centering theory, have been ardently pursued and tested empirically, and the ones which are computationally workable have been given preferences in the past. In this paper, I propose an alternative view on accessibility ranking based on the consideration of relevance. Although it has not been tested computational• •, certain advantages over existing discourse-based approaches are demonstrated. It is suggested that one possible start to test the present approach computationally is to focus on the use of discourse connectives which constrain contextual assumptions by directing the way an utterance is likely to achieve relevance.