Abstract
We present an implementation of a discourse parsing system for alexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar for discourse, specifying the integrationof sentence and discourse level processing. Our system is based on theassumption that the compositional aspects of semantics at thediscourse level parallel those at the sentence level. This coupling isachieved by factoring away inferential semantics and anaphoric features ofdiscourse connectives. Computationally, this parallelism is achievedbecause both the sentence and discourse grammar are LTAG-based and the sameparser works at both levels. The approach to an LTAG for discourse has beendeveloped by Webber and colleagues in some recent papers. Our system takes a discourseas input, parses the sentences individually, extracts the basic discourseconstituent units from the sentence derivations, and reparses the discoursewith reference to the discourse grammar while using the same parser usedat the sentence level.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bierner, G., 2001, “Alternative phrases and natural language information retrieval,” pp. 58–65 in ACL Proceedings, Toulouse, France.
Bierner, G. and Webber, B., 2000, “Inference through alternative set semantics,” Journal of Language and Computation 1, 259–274.
Forbes, K. and Miltsakaki, E., 2002, “Empirical studies of centering shifts and cue phrases as embedded segment boundary markers,” pp. 39–57 in Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, 'Current Work in Linguistics', E. Kaiser, ed., Vol. 7.2.
Gardent, C., 1997, “Discourse tree-adjoining grammars,” Univeristät des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Claus Report, No. 89.
Grosz, B.J. and Sidner, C.L., 1986, “Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse,” Computational Linguistics 12, 175–204.
Hirschberg, J. and Litman, D.J., 1987, “Now let's talk about now: Identifying cue phrases intonationally,” pp. 163–171 in ACL Proceedings.
Hitzeman, J., Moens, M., and Grover, C., 1995, “Algorithms for analysing the temporal structure of discourse,” pp. 253–260 in EACL Proceedings.
Hovy, E.H., 1993, “Automated discourse generation using discourse structure relations,” Artificial Intelligence 63, 341–385.
Joshi, A. and Kuhn, S., 1979, “Centered logic: The role of entity centered sentence representation in natural language inferencing,” pp. 435–439 in IJCAI-79.
Joshi, A. and Vijay-Shanker, K., 1999, “Compositional semantics with lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar (LTAG): How much underspecification is necessary?,” pp. 131–145 in IWCS Proceedings, Tilburg, Netherlands, H.C. Blunt and E.G.C. Thijsse, eds.
Kallmeyer, L. and Joshi, A., 1999, “Factoring predicate argument and scope semantics: Underspecified semantics with LTAG,” pp. 169–174 in Proceedings of the 12th Amsterdam Colloquium, P. Dekker, ed.
Kehler, A., 2000, “Resolving temporal relations using tense meaning and discourse interpretation,” in Formalizing the Dynamics of Information, M. Faller, S. Kaufmann, and M. Pauly, Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Knott, A., 1996, “A data-driven methodology for motivating a set of coherence relations,” Ph.D. Thesis, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh.
Knott, A., 2001, “Semantic and pragmatic relations and their intended effects,” pp. 127–151 in Text Representation: Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects, T. Sanders, J. Schilperoord, and W. Spooren, eds., Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Lagerwerf, L., 1998, Causal Connectives Have Presuppositions, The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics.
Lascarides, A. and Nicholas, A., 1993, “Temporal interpretation, discourse relations and commonsense entailment,” Linguistics and Philosophy 16, 437–493.
Mann, W.C. and Thompson, S.A., 1988, “Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization,” Text 8, 243–281.
Marcu, D., 2000, “The rhetorical parsing of unrestricted texts: A surface-based approach,” Computational Linguistics 26, 395–448.
Marcus, M.P., Santorini, B., and Marcinkiewicz, M.A., 1993, “Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn Treebank,” Computational Linguistics 19, 313–330.
Polanyi, L., 1996, “The linguistic structure of discourse,” CSLI Technical Report, CSLI-96-200.
Polanyi, L. and van den Berg, M.H., 1996, “Discourse structure and discourse interpretation,” pp. 113–131 in Proceedings of the 10th Amsterdam Colloquium, P. Dekker and M. Stokhof, eds., University of Amsterdam.
Rooth, M., 1992, “A theory of focus interpretation,” Natural Language Semantics 1, 75–116.
Sarkar, A., 2000, “Practical experiments in parsing using tree-adjoining grammars,” pp. 193–198 in Proceedings of the 5th TAG+ Workshop.
Sarkar, A., 2001, “Applying cotraining methods to statistical parsing,” in Proceedings of the 2nd NAACL, Pittsburgh, PA.
Scha, R. and Polanyi, L., 1988, “An augmented context free grammar for discourse,” pp. 573–577 in Proceedings of COLING.
Schilder, F., 1997, “Tree discourse grammar, or how to get attached to a discourse,” in Proceedings of the Tilburg Conference on Formal Semantics.
Steedman, M., 2000a, The Syntactic Process, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Steedman, M., 2000b, “Information structure and the syntax-phonology interface,” Linguistic Inquiry 34, 649–689.
Stone, M. and Webber, B., 1998, “Textual economy through close coupling of syntax and semantics,” pp. 178–187 in Proceedings of the 9th INLG Workshop, Somerset, NJ: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Stone, M., Doran, C., and Webber, B., 2003, “Microplanning from communicative intentions: Sentence planning using descriptions (SPUD),” Computational Intelligence, to appear.
Walker, M.A., 1993, “Informational redundancy and resource bounds in dialogue,” Ph.D. Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Webber, B., 1988, “Tense as discourse anaphor,” Computational Linguistics 14, 61–73.
Webber, B. and Joshi, A., 1998, “Anchoring a lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar for discourse,” pp. 86–92 in Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers: Proceedings of the ACL/COLING Workshop, M. Stede, L.Wanner, and E. Hovy, eds., Somerset, NJ: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Webber, B., Joshi, A., Stone, M., and Knott, A., 2003, “Anaphora and discourse structure,” Computational Linguistics, to appear.
Webber, B., Knott, A., and Joshi, A., 2000, “Multiple discourse connectives in a lexicalized grammar for discourse,” in Collected papers form the 3rd IWCS, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Webber, B., Knott, A., Stone, M., and Joshi, A., 1999a, “Discourse relations: A structural and presuppositional account using lexicalized TAG,” pp. 41–48 in ACL Proceedings.
Webber, B., Knott, A., Stone, M., and Joshi, A., 1999b, “What are little trees made of: A structural and presuppositional account using lexicalized TAG,” pp. 151–156 in ACL Proceedings, College Park, MD.
Xia, F., Palmer, M., and Joshi, A., 2000, “A uniform method of grammar extraction and its applications,” in Proceedings of the Joint Sigdat Conference on EMNLP/VLC, Hong Kong.
XTAG-Group, The, 2001, “A lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar for English,” Technical Report IRCS-01-03, University of Pennsylvania.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Forbes, K., Miltsakaki, E., Prasad, R. et al. D-LTAG System: Discourse Parsing with a Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 12, 261–279 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024137719751
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024137719751