In this seminar, first we will review several aspects of discourse structure, both global and local aspects.
We will then focus on certain aspects of local discourse structure, which provide some linguistic and computational insights for characterizing the transition form a sentence to the "immediate" discourse. These issues will be discussed from at least the following two perspectives: (1) local tracking of the entities that are being paid attention to, as described in the Centering Theory, and (2) the role of discourse connectives and their argument structure.
The seminar will involve active participation of students in terms of presentations and project work. Depending on your interests and background you may be able to participate in some ongoing projects-- (1) annotation of a corpus (Wall Street Journal Penn Treebank Corpus, PTB) with discourse connectives and their arguments, and their semantics (PDTB) (2) discourse parsing. Some possible applications of PDTB will be discussed also.
READING LIST: A preliminary reading list will be available at the first meeting and the final reading list will be developed very soon after that.
PREREQUISITES: CIS 530 or equivalent, Ling 549 or equivalent, or instructor's permission.
Linguistic notion of topic and aboutness (Reinhart 1982) -- Lukasz Abramovicz. This discussion may spill over into MODULE2.
Lukasz Abramovicz, Lucas Champollian, Nikhil Dinesh, Eva Florenico, Benjamin George, Matt Huenerfauth, Liang Huang, Laia Mayol, Nick Montfort, Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Tatjana Scheffler, Libin Shen, Partha Pratim Talukdar, Joshua Tauberer
A bibliography was distributed on 1/19. Copies of all papers that we will discuss will be distributed in the class, first set on 1/26 and the second set later.