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this paper, I consider a range of English expressions and show that their context-dependency can be characterized in terms of two properties: 1. They specify entities in an evolving model of the discourse that the listener is constructing; 2. The particular entity specified depends on another entity in that part of the evolving "discourse model" that the listener is currently attending to

This paper presents a computational model of how conversational participants collaborate in making referring expressions. The model is based on the planning paradigm. It employs plans for constructing and recognizing referring expressions and meta-plans for constructing and recognizing clarifications. This allows the model to account for the generation and understanding both of referring expressions and of their clarifications in a uniform framework using a single knowledge base.

This paper examines demonstrative pronouns used as deictics to refer to the interpretation of one or more clauses. Although this usage is frowned upon in style manuals (for example Strunk and White (1959) state that “This. The pronoun this, referring to the complete sense of a preceding sentence or clause, cannot always carry the load and so may produce an imprecise statement.”), it is nevertheless very common in written text. Handling this usage poses a problem for Natural Language Understanding systems. The solution I propose is based on distinguishing between what can be pointed to and what can be referred to by virtue of pointing. I argue that a restricted set of discourse segments yield what such demonstrative pronouns can point to and a restricted set of what Nunberg (1979) has called referring functions yield what they can refer to by virtue of that pointing.

This paper presents this algorithm, gives demonstrations of an implemented system, and describes the results of some preliminary empirical studies, which lend support to the algorithm

We address the problem of realizing communicative plans in graphics. Our approach calls for mapping communicative goals to conceptual tasks and then using task-based graphic design for selecting graphical techniques. In this paper, we present the mapping rules in several dimensions: data aggregation and selection, task synthesis, and task aggregation. Those rules have been incorporated in AutoBrief, a research system for multimedia explanation. Keywords Data graphic design, communicative plans, conceptual tasks 1. INTRODUCTION Visualizations are used in narratives, arguments, explanations and other communicative genres to succinctly convey complex relations or to organize a large amount of information. Such presentations are planned to achieve communicative goals (e.g., the user believes that insufficient airport capacity is the cause for some late cargo). Communicative planning involves reasoning about communicative goals, user's beliefs, and information about the domain, in order t...

This paper describes a media-independent knowledge representation scheme, or content language, for describing the content of communicative goals and actions. The language is used within an intelligent system for automatically generating integrated text and information graphics presentations about complex, quantitative information. The language is designed to satisfy four requirements: to represent information about complex quantitative relations and aggregate properties; compositionality; to represent certain pragmatic distinctions needed for satisfying communicative goals; and to be usable as input by the media-specific generators in our system. 1

NULL vs. OVERT SUBJECTS IN TURKISH DISCOURSE: A CENTERING APPROACH Author: Umit Deniz Turan Supervisor: Ellen F. Prince The purpose of this study is to explore an aspect of discourse coherence which involves anaphoric relations between utterances with special emphasis on subjects in Turkish. Based on an analysis of published narratives, three complementary and interrelated questions are addressed concerning discourse anaphora: 1. Which expressions are available for subsequent definite reference? 2. What factors determine the most salient entity in Turkish among a set of potential antecedents for subsequent definite reference? 3. What are the functions of a particular referential expression (null vs. overt pronouns vs. full NPs), depending on appropriate discourse conditions? An exploration regarding question 1 indicates that, while some NPs evoke discourse entities, other NPs do not. These two types of NPs represent referential and nonreferential expressions and they can function as ...

This paper gives an account of the role tense plays in the listener's reconstruction of the events and situations a speaker has chosen to describe. Several new ideas are presented: (a) that tense is better viewed by analogy with definite NPs than with pronouns; (b) that a narrative has a temporal focus that grounds the context-dependency of tense; and (c) that focus management heuristics can be used to track the movement of temporal focus. 1 1.

We present a system for the incremental interpretation of natural-language utterances in context. The main goal of the work is to account for the influences of context on interpretation, while preserving compositionality to the extent possible. To achieve this goal, we introduce a representational device, conditional interpretations, and a rule system for constructing them. Conditional interpretations represent the potential contributions of phrases to the interpretation of an utterance. The rules specify how phrase interpretations are combined and how they are elaborated with respect to context. The control structure defined by the rules determines the points in the interpretation process at which sufficient information becomes available to carry out specific inferential interpretation steps, such as determining the plausibility of particular referential connections or modifier attachments. We have implemented these ideas in Candide, a system for interactive acquisition of procedural ...