Combined discourse representations: Coherence relations and questions under Discussion

What it is about

A short paper that analyses one passage (a section of a 2004 political keynote) three ways: with the Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations (CCR), with RST, and as a QUD tree. CCR and RST found the same 31 clause-level segments; the QUD analysis found 47, because every phrase with its own focus becomes a unit (appositions such as «Barack, or "blessed"», and NP/VP coordinations), while an adjunct clause carrying only given information («While studying here, my father met my mother») is not split off but becomes part of the question's background. Coherence relations map onto QUD trees: a subordinating relation such as REASON becomes a subordinated why-QUD; coordinating relations (LIST, JOINT) become sibling answers under one QUD; CONTRAST and SEQUENCE need subquestions with contrastive topics (each event at its own topic time); a CONCESSION that the QUD tree misses can be added as a link between question nodes.

Ideas

• I1. Read Mova's frame links as QUDs, using the paper's mapping, so that world/src/qud.rs and the frame reader share one structure: a cause link = a why-QUD on the effect frame, answered by the cause frame; a run of next links = sibling answers under «what did X do (then)?», each with its own topic time. A why question in a course is then answered by walking the same edge. Check that every cause link in the frame bench gold yields a QUD the stack accepts.
• I2. Treat an appositive or parenthetical inside a sentence as answering a subquestion, not the main QUD (non-at-issue). The frame reader's appositions (coref appos sieve; appos-quote repair in prag/src/frames.rs) should not compete as answers to the sentence's QUD in the student. Count course errors where the winning frame came from an apposition.
• I3. Do not split off an adjunct clause that only repeats given information: a while/when-clause whose event already exists as a frame should link to that frame (as its time) instead of creating a new event. Measure duplicate event frames on the frame bench («next» precision) with and without the merge.

For Mova

36. Discourse relations and coherence §3, §9, §11 (RST, QUD, links between frames), 29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure.md. Code: world/src/qud.rs, prag/src/frames.rs (cause/next links, appositions, when-clauses), world/src/knowledge.rs. Measures: frame bench cause/next F1; course answers from apposition frames.

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{riester2021combined,
  title = {{Combined discourse representations: Coherence relations and questions under Discussion}},
  author = {Riester, Arndt and Nápoles, Amalia Canes and Hoek, Jet},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the First Workshop on Integrating Perspectives on Discourse Annotation},
  year = {2021},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.discann-1.5/}
}

References

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