CIS 630 (Fall 2006):

Instructor: Aravind K. Joshi ( joshi@linc.cis.upenn.edu)

Class: W 3-6 p.m., IRCS Fishbowl

Office Hours: By appointment

• Background and Introduction
• Schedule
• Bibliography
• Notes

Background and Introduction

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.

Tentative Schedule

• MODULE 1: (1/10, 19-26) Introduction : Introduction to local coherence of discourse, discussion of Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein (1995), Joshi and Kuhn (1979) and Joshi and Weinstein (1983) -- Joshi and Prasad.

  Linguistic notion of topic and aboutness (Reinhart 1982) -- Lukasz Abramovicz. This discussion may spill over into MODULE2.

• MODULE2: (2/2) Discourse Structure and Topics : Continuation of Reinhart (1982) and structure of discourse (Grosz and Sidner (1986))-- Tatjana Scheffler.

• MODULE 3: (2/9) Pronoun resolution, centering theory in terms of constraints Papers assigned: Centering approach to pronouns (Brennan, Friedman, and Pollard (1987)), BFP and optimality theory, centering theory in terms of constraints (Beaver (2004)-- Benjamin George (BFP), Laia Mayol, Eva Florencio, and Partha Pratim Talukdar (Beaver (2004).

• MODULE 4: (2/16) Kathy McCoy--visitor: Centering and anaphora resolution, appropriateness, alternatives etc. Details to be announced later. Students assigned: Lucas Champollian, Nikhil Dinesh, Liang Huang. Papers assigned: Kathy McCoy will continue some discussion of BFP (1987) paper, Suri and McCoy (1994), possibly also Kehler(1997).

• MODULE 5: (2/23) Barbara di Eugenio --visitor: Details to be announced later. Students assigned: Nick Montfort, Joshua Tauberer. Papers assigned: Poesio et al. (2004), di Eugenio (1998).

• MODULE 6 (3/2) Matthew Stone --visitor : Details to be announced later. Students assigned: Matt Huenerfauth, Libin Shen.

• MODULES 7-13 (3/16, 23, 30, 4/6, 13, 20, 27?) Discourse connectives, their argument structure, annotation of a corpus, sense disambiguation etc.: Details later.

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  Participants

  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

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  Bibliography

  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.

• Centering and game theory, Robin Clark, 2005.

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  Notes