Discourse Coherence

Historical notes

1. What alternatives to RST and PDTB exist for coherence relations?
   Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), the Linguistic Discourse Model, and graph representations (Wolf and Gibson) motivated by crossed bracketings that can’t form a tree.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 25, Historical notes, p. 588
2. How has the relation between explicit and implicit connectives been exploited?
   Remove explicit connectives and re-predict them to get training data for implicit relations (Marcu and Echihabi); DisSent predicts explicit discourse markers between sentences, producing strong sentence representations.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 25, Historical notes, p. 588
3. What distinction of Sidner’s anticipated Centering’s backward- and forward-looking centers?
   Current discourse focus vs potential foci. Grosz earlier distinguished global focus (entities relevant to the whole discourse) and immediate focus (most central to an utterance).
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 25, Historical notes, p. 589