Discourse Structure
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Discourse Structure Grosz and Sidner
Why bother? • Leads to an account of discourse meaning • Constrains how utterances are related • Useful for explaining interruptions • and the purpose of discourse participants
Linguistic • Structure of the sequence of the utterances • Discourse segments • Utterances within a segment contribute to a common purpose • Drawback: hard to figure out segmentation • Clues: pause lengths, cue words, use of referring expressions
Intentional • Discourse Purpose – reason why discourse happens in the first place • Discourse Segment Purpose – how a segment contributes to the DP • Relations • Dominance (DSP1 dominates DSP2) • Satisfaction Precedence (DSP1 sat-pre’s DSP2)
Attentional • Different: property fo Discourse not participants • “abstraction of the participants’ focus of attention as their discourse unfolds” • Dynamic stack that records salient objects, properties and relations • Focusing – process of manipulating focus spaces on attentional (focus) stack
Attentional • DS’s tied to focus spaces. • Pushed and popped off stack depending on dominance hierarchy • Focus stack: only what is relevant at that time, Intentional – complete record • At end of discourse, focus stack is empty • Only attentional state constrains referring expressions
Processing Issues • How does OCP judge segmentation? • Intention recognition: • Cue phrases • Utterance level intentions • Shared knowledge about actions and objects in domain
Processing Issues • Recognition complete at end of segment • But OCP must be able to recognize a generalization of DSP • Focus Stack: • Constrain range of DSP’s for relating to current DSP • Constrain search for possible referents (centering)
Interruptions • True Interruptions • Weak Interruptions/Flashbacks • Digressions