Discourse entities in Janus

Abstract

This paper addresses issues that arose in applying the model for discourse entity (DE) generation in B. Webber's work (1978, 1983) to an interactive multimodal interface. Her treatment was extended in 4 areas: (1)the notion of context dependence of DEs was formalized in an intensional logic, (2)the treatment of DEs for indefinite NPs was modified to use skolem functions, (3)the treatment of dependent quantifiers was generalized, and (4) DEs originating from non-linguistic sources, such as pointing actions, were taken into account. The discourse entities are used in intra-and extra-sentential pronoun resolution in BBN Janus.

A language-independent anaphora resolution system for understanding multilingual texts

“…A discourse marker (cf. Kamp [14], or "discourse entity" in Ayuso [3]) is created for each noun or verb in the input sentence during semantic interpietation. A discourse marker is static in that once it is introduced to the discourse world, the information within it is never changed.…”

The representation of multimodal user interface dialogues using discourse pegs

“…knowledge representation. LOs are also like Discourse Referents (Karttunen, 1968), Discourse Entities ( (Webber, 1978), (Dahl and Ball, 1990), (Ayuso, 1989), and others), File Cards (Heim, 1982), and Discourse Markers (Kamp, 1981) in at least two ways. First, they arise from a meaning representation of the surface linguistic form based on a set of generation rules which consider language-specific features, and facts about the logical form representation: quantifier scope assignments, syntactic number and gender markings, distributive versus collective reading information, ordering of modifiers, etc.…”

“…First, they arise from a meaning representation of the surface linguistic form based on a set of generation rules which consider language-specific features, and facts about the logical form representation: quantifier scope assignments, syntactic number and gender markings, distributive versus collective reading information, ordering of modifiers, etc. Janus (Ayuso, 1989) allows for DE's introduced into the discourse context through a nonlinguistic (the haptic) channel. But in Janus, a mouse click on a screen icon is assigned honorary linguistic status via the logical form representation of a definite NP, and that introduces a new DE into the context.…”

Computational aspects of discourse in the context of MUC-3

“…The discourse components of those systems, which were developed primarily for question-answering applications in limited domains, are able to take advantage of having complete analyses of the input sentences . For example , syntactic information is used to constrain intra-sentential anaphora [19] ; complete semantic representation s (including quantification information) are used in generating discourse entities in a principled way [2] ; and centering heuristics [7,12] are used for tracking focus, improving anaphora resolution .…”