Anaphora and Discourse Structure
Bonnie Webber∗ Matthew Stone† Edinburgh University Rutgers University Aravind Joshi‡ Alistair Knott§ University of Pennsylvania University of Otago
We argue in this article that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure instead work anaphor- ically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by adverbial connectives can interact with that associated with discourse structure. We conclude by sketching out a lexicalized grammar for discourse that facilitates discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor resolution, and inference.
1. Introduction
It is a truism that a text means more than the sum of its component sentences. One source of additional meaning are relations taken to hold between adjacent sentences “syntactically” connected within a larger discourse structure. It has been very difficult, however, to say what discourse relations there are, either theoretically (Mann and Thompson 1988; Kehler 2002; Asher and Lascarides 2003) or empirically (Knott 1996). Knott’s empirical attempt to identify and characterize cue phrases as evidence for discourse relations illustrates some of the difficulties. Knott used the following theory-neutral test to identify cue phrases: For a potential cue phrase φ in naturally occurring text, consider in isolation the clause in which it appears. If the clause ap- pears incomplete without an adjacent left context, whereas it appears complete if φ is removed, then φ is a cue phrase. Knott’s test produced a nonexhaustive list of about two hundred different phrases from 226 pages of text. He then attempted to charac- terize the discourse relation(s) conveyed by each phrase by identifying when (always, sometimes, never) one phrase could substitute for another in a way that preserved meaning. He showed how these substitution patterns could be a consequence of a set of semantic features and their values. Roughly speaking, one cue phrase could always substitute for another if it had the same set of features and values, sometimes do so if it was less specific than the other in terms of its feature values, and never do so if their values conflicted for one or more features.
∗ School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LW, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. † Department of Computer Science, Rutgers Universtiy, 110 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8019. E-mail: [email protected]. ‡ Department of Computer & Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, 200 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389. E-mail: [email protected]. § Department of Computer Science, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, DUNEDIN 9015, New Zealand. E-mail: [email protected].