Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse

9 Comparison with previous work

1. How does centering differ from Sidner’s focusing theory?
   Sidner has a discourse focus, an actor focus and potential foci per utterance; centering has one \(C_b\). In “I haven’t seen Jeff for several days. Carl thinks he’s studying for his exams, but I think he went to the Cape with Linda”, Sidner’s actor focus wrongly prefers Carl for the last “he”; centering makes Jeff the \(C_b\).
   • Grosz et al., 1995, Centering (Computational Linguistics), §9
2. What later research directions grew out of centering?
   Cross-linguistic studies (German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish), centering-based pronoun resolution algorithms (e.g. Brennan, Friedman and Pollard 1987), psycholinguistic and corpus evaluation, and the interaction of centering with dialogue and global discourse structure.
   • Grosz et al., 1995, Centering (Computational Linguistics), §9