Coherence in Natural Language
Coherence in Natural Language

Author: Florian Wolf

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 0262232510

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A discussion of coherence in natural language that develops criteria for descriptively adequate data structures and examines the influence of coherence on psycholinguistic processes and determining the relative importance of document segments. In Coherence and Natural Language, Florian Wolf and Edward Gibson specify and evaluate criteria for descriptively adequate data structures for representing discourse coherence. They test the influence of discourse structure on pronoun processing, evaluate different approaches for determining the relative importance of document segments, and propose a new coherence-based algorithm to accomplish this task. Their book offers the first large-scale empirical evaluation of data structures for representing coherence and also includes novel psycholinguistic tests of existing information extraction and text summarization systems. Wolf and Gibson evaluate whether tree structures are descriptively adequate for representing discourse coherence and conclude that more powerful data structure is needed because there are many different kinds of crossed dependencies and nodes with multiple parents in the discourse structures of naturally occurring texts. They propose that connected, labeled chain graphs make a better representation of coherence. They find additionally that causal coherence relations affect people's strategies for pronoun processing, which points to the psychological validity of coherence relations. Finally, they evaluate word-based, layout-based, and coherence-based approaches for estimating the importance of document segments in a document and find that coherence-based methods that operate on chain graphs perform best. With its attention to empirical validation and psycholinguistic processing, the book raises issues that are relevant to cognitive science as well as natural language processing and information extraction.

Cohesion, Coherence and Temporal Reference from an Experimental Corpus Pragmatics Perspective
Cohesion, Coherence and Temporal Reference from an Experimental Corpus Pragmatics Perspective

Author: Cristina Grisot

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-10-06

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 3319967525

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This open access book provides new methodological and theoretical insights into temporal reference and its linguistic expression, from a cross-linguistic experimental corpus pragmatics approach. Verbal tenses, in general, and more specifically the categories of tense, grammatical and lexical aspect are treated as cohesion ties contributing to the temporal coherence of a discourse, as well as to the cognitive temporal coherence of the mental representations built in the language comprehension process. As such, it investigates the phenomenon of temporal reference at the interface between corpus linguistics, theoretical linguistics and pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, psycholinguistics, natural language processing and machine translation.

Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar
Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar

Author: Andrew Kehler

Publisher: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9781575862163

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A natural language discourse is more than an arbitrary sequence of utterances; a discourse exhibits coherence. Despite its centrality to discourse interpretation, coherence rarely plays a role in theories of linguistic phenomena that apply across utterances. In this book, Andrew Kehler provides an analysis of coherence relationships between utterances that is rooted in three types of 'connection among ideas' first articulated by the philosopher David Hume - Resemblance, Cause or Effect, and Contiguity. Kehler then shows how these relationships affect the distribution of a variety of linguistic phenomena, including verb phrase ellipsis, gapping, extraction from coordinate structures, tense, and pronominal reference. In each of these areas, Kehler demonstrates how the constraints imposed by linguistic form interact with those imposed by the process of establishing coherence to explain data that has eluded previous analyses. This book will be of interest to researchers from the broad spectrum of disciplines from which discourse is studied, as well as those working in syntax, semantics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and philosophy of language. It is crucial reading for those studying the specific problems addressed in the book, which include discourse coherence, ellipsis, gapping, extraction from coordinate clauses, tense, and pronominal reference.

New Perspectives on Cohesion and Coherence
New Perspectives on Cohesion and Coherence

Author: Katrin Menzel

Publisher: Saint Philip Street Press

Published: 2020-10-09

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 9781013287848

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"The contributions to this volume investigate relations of cohesion and coherence as well as instantiations of discourse phenomena and their interaction with information structure in multilingual contexts. Some contributions concentrate on procedures to analyze cohesion and coherence from a corpus-linguistic perspective. Others have a particular focus on textual cohesion in parallel corpora that include both originals and translated texts. Additionally, the papers in the volume discuss the nature of cohesion and coherence with implications for human and machine translation. The contributors are experts on discourse phenomena and textuality who address these issues from an empirical perspective. The chapters in this volume are grounded in the latest research making this book useful to both experts of discourse studies and computational linguistics, as well as advanced students with an interest in these disciplines. We hope that this volume will serve as a catalyst to other researchers and will facilitate further advances in the development of cost-effective annotation procedures, the application of statistical techniques for the analysis of linguistic phenomena and the elaboration of new methods for data interpretation in multilingual corpus linguistics and machine translation." This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

(In)coherence of Discourse
(In)coherence of Discourse

Author: Maxime Amblard

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-06-12

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 3030714349

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This present book explores recent advances in modeling discourse processes, in particular, new approaches aimed at understanding pathological language behavior specific to schizophrenia. The contributors examine the modeling paradigm of formal semantics, which falls within the scope of both linguistics and logic while providing overlapping links with other fields such as philosophy of language and cognitive psychology. This book is based on results presented during the series of workshops on (In)Coherence and Discourse organized by SLAM (Schizophrenia and Language: Analysis and Modeling), a project developed to systemize the study of pathological language processing by taking an overarching interdisciplinary approach combining psychology, linguistics, computer science and philosophy. The principle focus is on conversations produced by people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. The contributions come from young and experienced researchers, and invited speakers. The book appeals to likeminded students and researchers.

Coherence and Grounding in Discourse
Coherence and Grounding in Discourse

Author: Russell S. Tomlin

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 1987-01-01

Total Pages: 522

ISBN-13: 9027286272

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This volume seeks to expand our understanding of the relation holding between discourse relations, cognitive units, and linguistic coding. The twenty contributions in this collection explore one or more of the following themes: How point of view, or the salience of information in discourse, affects the organizational coherence of text and discourse; the concept of cognitive and linguistic event and how events are reflected in text and discourse organization; the nature of linguistic coding of events and other kinds of significant information; and the cognitive bases or cognitive correlates of the linguistic organization of discourse.

Context and Coherence
Context and Coherence

Author: Una Stojnić

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021-02-25

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0198865465

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Natural languages are riddled with context-sensitivity, yet how do we understand one another so effortlessly? Contrary to the dominant position, this book argues that meaning is determined entirely by discourse conventions, as we draw on a broad array of subtle linguistic conventions that determine the interpretation of context-sensitive items.

The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics
The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics

Author: Keith Allan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-01-12

Total Pages: 967

ISBN-13: 1139501895

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Pragmatics is the study of human communication: the choices speakers make to express their intended meaning and the kinds of inferences that hearers draw from an utterance in the context of its use. This Handbook surveys pragmatics from different perspectives, presenting the main theories in pragmatic research, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge solutions. It addresses questions of rational and empirical research methods, what counts as an adequate and successful pragmatic theory, and how to go about answering problems raised in pragmatic theory. In the fast-developing field of pragmatics, this Handbook fills the gap in the market for a one-stop resource to the wide scope of today's research and the intricacy of the many theoretical debates. It is an authoritative guide for graduate students and researchers with its focus on the areas and theories that will mark progress in pragmatic research in the future.

Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence
Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence

Author: C. Unger

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-11-28

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0230288200

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This book seeks to explain how discourse types influence the addressee's understanding of the communicator's intention. Examining global coherence-based accounts as well as proposals based on Gricean pragmatics, it argues that the key to a solution lies in the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber & Wilson.