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Anaphora and Discourse Structure

What it is about

The paper argues that discourse adverbials such as "then", "otherwise", "instead", "also" and "for example" are anaphors. They link their clause to an entity in the discourse context, and they do not signal a structural relation between adjacent units. The argument rests on a test. Structural connectives (subordinating conjunctions and paired connectives such as "on the one hand ... on the other hand") may stretch a dependency over embedded material, but they never let it cross another dependency. Adverbials do cross. In "because then he discovered he was broke", "then" takes its first argument across the "because" link; in "if instead you plan to go to the zoo", "instead" does the same. Discourse structure therefore stays a simple tree or DAG without crossings, and the adverbial's first argument is found by anaphora, as pronouns and definite NPs are. The paper sketches a lexicalised tree-adjoining grammar for discourse, with initial trees for subordinate conjunctions and adverbials. It reports no numbers; the evidence is in constructed examples.

Ideas

For Mova

The chapters are 36. Discourse relations and coherence, 35. Reference and coreference (anaphora) and 38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech. The code is world/src/qud.rs, world/src/narr.rs and prag/src/frames.rs. The measure is the accuracy of adverbial antecedents on a hand-checked set, run twice, with the shuffled control.

Topics: Discourse analysis · Coreference resolution

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1162/089120103322753347

@article{webber2003anaphora,
  title = {{Anaphora and Discourse Structure}},
  author = {Webber, Bonnie and Stone, Matthew and Joshi, Aravind and Knott, Alistair},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2003},
  doi = {10.1162/089120103322753347},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/089120103322753347}
}

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