Natural language research announcements

["Faust, Mark R" <mfaust AT ad.uiuc.edu>]

Dear all,

 

This afternoon, Monday, November 10^th, Dr. Aravind Joshi from the University of Pennsylvania will be giving the Distinguished Lecturer Series (DLS) talk at the Siebel Center.   Also, do not forget that there will be a STUDENT MEETING with Dr. Joshi TODAY from 2-3pm in room 3102 Siebel Center. 

 

 

Abstract:

My overall goal will be to discuss some issues concerning the dependencies at the discourse level and at the sentence level. The relationship between natural language and formal grammars is well understood at the sentence level. However, we know very little about this relationship at the discourse level. What aspects of sentence structure, if any, are carried over to the discourse level and conversely? Further, what aspects of discourse structure suggest a possibly different perspective on the sentence structure itself? These are some of the issues I will discuss in the context of an annotated corpus, the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB)*, a corpus in which we annotate the discourse connectives (explicit and implicit) and their arguments together with "attributions" of the arguments and the relations denoted by the connectives, and also the senses of the connectives*.

I will first briefly describe PDTB and then I will focus on the complexity of dependencies in terms of (a) the elements that bear the dependency relations, (b) patterns of these dependencies such as nested and crossed dependencies, dependencies with shared arguments, and (c) attributions and their relationship to the dependencies, among others. I will compare these dependencies with those at the sentence level and discuss some issues that relate to the transition from the sentence level to the level of "immediate discourse" and propose some conjectures.

 

 

Best regards,

 

Mark Faust

 

Department of Computer Science

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Faculty Support Staff

3316 Siebel Center

201 N. Goodwin

Urbana, IL 61801

 

Phone: (217) 244-0425