A Rule Based Approach to Discourse Parsing

In this paper we present an overview of recent developments in discourse theory and parsing under the Linguistic Discourse Model (LDM) framework, a semantic theory of discourse structure. We give a novel approach to the problem of discourse segmentation based on discourse semantics and sketch a limited but robust approach to symbolic discourse parsing based on syntactic, semantic and lexical rules. To demonstrate the utility of the system in a real application, we briefly describe the architecture of the PALSUMM system, a symbolic summarization system being developed at FX Palo Alto Laboratory that uses discourse structures constructed using the theory outlined to summarize written English prose texts. 1