6.892 | Spring 2004 | Graduate

Computational Models of Discourse

Readings

LEC # TOPICS READINGS
1 Introduction

Buy at MIT Press Grosz, Barbara J., Martha E. Pollack, and Candace L. Sidner. “Discourse.” In Foundations of Cognitive Science. Edited by M. L. Posner. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989, pp. 437-467. ISBN: 0262161125.

Webber, Bonnie L. “Computational Perspectives on Discourse and Dialog.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Edited by D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, and H. E. Hamilton. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2001, pp. 798-817.

Moore, Johanna D., and Peter Wiemer-Hastings. “Discourse in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence.” In Handbook of Discourse Processes. Edited by A. G. Graesser, M. A. Gernbacher, and S. R. Goldman. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003, pp. 439-487.

Kintsch, Walter. The representation of meaning in memory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1974. ISBN: 0898591309

Haviland S. E., and H. H. Clark. “What’s new? Acquiring new information as a process in comprehension.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13 (1974): 515-521.

Terry Winograd

SHRDLU

2 Topic Segmentation: Agreement, Evaluation, Automatic Text Segmentation

Hearst, Marti. “Multi-paragraph segmentation of expository text.” Proceedings of the ACL, 1994, pp. 9-16.

Pevzner, Lev, and Marti Hearst. “A Critique and Improvement of an Evaluation Metric for Text Segmentation.” Computational Linguistics (1994): 9-16. (PDF)

Passonneau, Rebecca J., and Diane J. Litman. “Intention-based Segmentation: Human Reliability and correlation with linguistic cues.” Proceedings of the ACL, 1993, pp. 148-155. (PDF)

Grosz, Barbara, and Julia Hirschberg. “Some intonational charachteristics of discourse.” Proceedings of the ICSLP, 1992. (PS)

3 Topic Segmentation (cont.): Hierarchical Text Segmentation, Meeting Segmentation

Yaari, Yaacov. “Segmentation of expository texts by hierarchical agglomerative clustering.” Proceedings of the RANLP'97, 1997.

van Mulbregt, P., I. Carp, L. Gillick, S. Lowe, and J. Yamron. “Segmentation of Automatically Transcribed Broadcast News Text.” Proceedings of the ICASSP. (PDF)

Galley, Michel, Kathleen McKeown, Eric Fosler-Lussier, and Hongyan Jing. “Discourse Segmentation of Multi-Party Conversation.” Proceedings of the ACL, 2003.

4 Cohesion and Local Coherence: Lexical Chains, Centering Theory; Applications to Automated Essay Scoring

Grosz, Barbara, Aravind Joshi, and Scott Weinstein. “Centering: A Framework for Modelling the Local Coherence of Discourse.” Computational Linguistics 21, no. 2 (1995): 203-225. (PDF)

Halliday, Michael, and Ruqaiya Hasan. Cohesion in English. London, UK: Longman Publishing Group, 1976. ISBN: 0582550416.

Morris, Jane, and Graeme Hirst. “Lexical Cohesion Computed by Thesaural Relations as an Indicator of the Structure of Text.” Computational Linguistics 17, no. 1 (1991): 21-48.

Foltz, Peter, Walter Kintsch, and Thomas Landauer. “The Measurement of Textual Coherence with Latent Semantic Analysis.” Discourse Processes 25, no. 2 (1998): 285-307. (PDF)

Miltsakaki, Eleni, and Karen Kukich. “The Role of Centering Theory’s Rough-Shift in the Teaching and Evaluation of Writing Skills.” Proceedings of the ACL, 2002.

Barzilay, Regina, and Michael Elhadad." Using Lexical Chains for Text Summarization." Proceedings of the Intelligent Scalable Text Summarization Workshop, 1997.

5 Automatic Reference Resolution

Keller, Andrew. “Discourse in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence.” In Speech and Language Processing. Edited by Daniel Jurafsky, and James Martin. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000, pp. 671-684. ISBN: 0130950696.

Lappin, Shalom, and Herbert Leass. “An Algorithm for Pronominal Anaphora Resolution.” Computational Linguistics 20, no. 4 (1994): 536-561. (PDF)

Cardie, Claire, and Kiri Wagstaff. “Noun Phrase Coreference as Clustering.” Proceedings of the EMNLP and VLC, 1999. (PDF)

Soon, Wee Meng, Daniel Chung Yong Lim, and Hwee Tou Ng. “A Machine Learning Approach to Coreference Resolution of Noun Phrases.” Computational Linguistics 27, no. 4 (2001): 521-544.

Ng, Vincent, and Claire Cardie. “Improving Machine Learning Approaches to Coreference Resolution.” Proceedings of the ACL, 2002. (PDF)

Ng, Vincent. “Machine Learning for Coreference Resolution: Recent Successes and Future Directions.” Technical Report CUL.CIS/TR2003-1918, Cornell University, 2003.

6 Automatic Reference Resolution and Reference Generation

Mueller, Christoph, Stefan Rapp, and Michael Strube. “Applying Co-Training to Reference Resolution.” Proceedings of the ACL, 2002. (PDF)

Ng, Vincent, and Claire Cardie. “Weakly Supervised Natural Language Learning Without Redundant Views.Proceedings of NAACL-HLT, 2003.

Ge, Niyu, John Hale, and Eugene Charniak. “A Statistical Approach to Anaphora Resolution_._” Proceedings of WVLC, 1998. (PDF)

Hobbs, Jerry. “Resolving pronoun references_._” Lingua 44 (1978).

Walker, Marilyn A. “Evaluating Discourse Processing Algorithms_._” Proceedings of the ACL, 1989. (PDF)

Strube, Michael, and Christoph Muller. “A Machine Learning Approach to Pronoun Resolution in Spoken Dialogue.Proceedings of the ACL, 2003.

Byron, Donna. “Resolving Pronominal Reference to Abstract Entities.Proceedings of the ACL, 2002.

7 Generation of Referring Expressions

Buy at MIT Press Levelt, Willem. Speaking: From Intentions to Articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. ISBN: 0262121379.

Dale, Robert. “Cooking Up Referring Expressions.Proceedings of the ACL, 1989. 

Reiter, Ehud, and Robert Dale. “A Fast Algorithm for the Generation of Referring Expressions.” Proceedings of the COLING, 1992.

Radev, Dragomir. “Learning Correlations between Linguistic Indicators and Semantic Constraints: Reuse of Context-Dependent Descriptions of Entities.” Proceedings of the ACL/COLING, 1998. (PDF)

Nenkova, Ani, and Kathleen McKeown. “References to Named Entities: a Corpus Study.” Proceedings of the NAACL/HLT, 2003 (Companion Volume). (PDF)

8 Domain-dependent Models of Text Structure

Teufel, Simone, and Marc Moens. “What’s yours and what’s mine: Determining Intellectual Attribution in Scientific Text.” Proceedings of the EMNLP and VLC, 2000. (PDF)

Duboue, Pablo, and Kathleen R. McKeown. “Empirically Estimating Order Constraints for Content Planning in Generation.” Proceedings of the ACL/EACL, 2001.

Barzilay, Regina, and Lillian Lee. “Catching the Drift: Probabilistic Content Models, with Applications to Generation and Summarization.” Proceedings of the NAACL/HLT, 2004 (to appear).

9 Rhetorical Structure Theory
Guest Speaker: Florian Wolf

Mann, William, and Sandra Thompson. “Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization.” Text 8, no. 3 (1988).

Marcu, Daniel. “Building Up Rhetorical Structure Trees.” Proceeding of the AAAI, 1996. (PS)

Marcu, Daniel, and Abdessamad Echihabi. “An Unsupervised Approach to Recognizing Discourse Relations.” Proceedings of the ACL/NAACL, 2002. (PDF - 1.1 MB)

Florian Wolf’s Presentation

10 Discourse Structure in Text Summarization; Alignment
11 Temporal Ordering in Discourse

Reichnbach, Hans.The Elements of Symbolic Logic. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1947. ISBN: 048620045.

Webber, Bonnie L. “Tense as discourse anaphor.Computational Linguistics 14, no. 2 (1988).

Lascarides, Alex, and Nicholas Asher. “Temporal Interpretation, Discourse Relations and Commonsense Entailment.” Linguistics and Philosophy 16, no. 5 (1993).

Mani, Inderjeet, and George Wilson. “Robust Temporal Processing of the News.” Proceedings of the ACL, 2003.

Mani, Inderjeet, Barry Schiffman, and Jianping Zhang. “Inferring Temporal ordering of the Events in News.” Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL, 2003. (PDF)

Lapata, Mirella, and Alex Lascaridis. “Inferring Sentence Internal Temporal Information.” Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL, 2004.

12 Prosody and Discourse
Guest Speaker: Chao Wang

Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., and A. Turk. “A prosody tutorial for investigators of auditory sentence processing.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 25 (1996): 193-247.

Chen, Ken, and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson. “An Automatic Prosody Labeling System Using ANN-Based Syntactic-Prosodic Model and GMM-Based Acoustic-Prosodic Model.” ICASSP, 2004. (PDF)

13 Intentions and the Structure of Discourse

Grosz, Barbara, and Candace L. Sidner. “Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse.Computational Linguistics 12, no. 3 (1986): 175-204.

Mooreh, Johanna D., and Martha E. Pollack. “A Problem for RST: The need for Multi-level Discourse Analysis.” Computational Linguistics 18, no. 4 (1992): 537-544.

14 Studies of Dialogues; Taxonomy of Speech Acts

Levinson, S. Pragmatics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ISBN: 0521294142.

Sacks, H., E. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson. “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation.” Language 50, no. 4 (1974): 696-735.

Hirschberg, Julia, and Diane Litman. “Empirical studies on the disambiguation of cue phrases.” Computational Linguistics 19, no. 3 (1993): 501-530.

Grice, H. P. “Further Notes on Logic and conversation.” In Speech Acts: Syntax and Semantics. Edited by P. Cole. Vol. 9. 1978, pp. 113-127.

Austin, J. L. How to do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. ISBN: 0674411528.

Allen, J., and M. Cofe. “Draft of DAMSL: Dialog Act Markup in Several Layers.”

Searle, J. R. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979. ISBN: 0521229014.

15 Automatic Interpretation of Dialogue Acts Stolcke, A., N. Coccaro, R. Bates, P. Taylor, C. Van Ess-Dykema, K. Ries, E. Shriberg, D. Jurafsky, R. Martin, and M. Meteer. “Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech.” Computatuinal Linguistics 26, no. 3 (2000).
16 Learning Dialogue Strategies via Reinforcement Learning

Levin, E., R. Pieraccini, and W. Eckert. “A Stochastic Model of Human-machine Interaction for Learning Dialog Strategies.” IEEE Transactions on speech and audio processing 8, no. 1 (2000). (PDF)

Singh, S., M. Kearns, D. Litman, and M. Walker. “Reinforcement Learning for Spoken Dialogue Systems.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 12. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. (PDF)

Walker, M. A., J. C. Fromer, and S. Narayanan. “Learning Optimal Dialogue Strategies: A Case Study of a Spoken Dialogue Agent for Email.” Proceedings of the ACL-COLING, 1998. (PDF)

17 MIT Dialogue Systems  
18 Dialogue Systems

Walker, M., I. Langkilde, J. Wright, A. Gorin, and D. Litman. “Learning to Predict Problematic Situations in a Spoken Dialogue System: Experiments with How May I Help You?.” Proceedings of NAACL, 2000.

Litman, D. J., M. A. Walker, and M. S. Kearns. “Automatic Detection of Poor Speech Recognition at the Dialogue Level.” Proceedings of ACL, 1999. (PS)

Gorin, A. L., G. Riccardi, and J. H. Wright. “How May I Help You?Speech Communications 23, no. 1/2, (1997): 113-127.

Litman, D. J., and S. Pan. “Designing and Evaluating an Adaptive Spoken Dialogue System.” User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 12, no. 2/3 (2002): 111-137. (PDF)

Kearns, M., C. Isbell, S. Singh, D. Litman, and J. Howe. “CobotDS: A Spoken Dialogue System for Chat.” Proceedings of AAAI, 2002. (PDF)

19 Plan Recognition

Lesh, N., C. Rich, and C. L. Sidner. “Using Plan Recognition in Human-Computer Collaboration.” Merl Technical Report, 1998. (PDF)

Goldman, R., C. W. Geib, and C. A. Miller. “A New Model of Plan Recognition.” Proceedings of UAI, 1999.

Charniak, E., and R.P. Goldman. “A Bayesian model of plan recognition.” Artificial Intelligence 64, no. 1 (1993): 53-79.

Vilain, M. “Getting serious about parsing plans: A grammatical analysis of plan recognition.” Proceedings of AAAI, 1990, pp. 190-197.

Kautz, H., and J. Allen. “Generalized plan recognition.” Proceedings of AAAI, 1986, pp. 32-38.

20 Evaluation for Discourse Processing  
21 Discourse in Psycholinguistics  
22 TBA  
23-24 Project Presentations  

Course Info

As Taught In
Spring 2004
Level