Publication
Discourse Structure and Language Technology
Bonnie Webber; Markus Egg; Valia Kordoni
In: Ruslan Mitkov (Hrsg.). Journal of Natural Language Engineering (JNLE), Vol. 01, Pages 1-40, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012.
Abstract
An increasing number of researchers and practitioners in Natural Language Engineering
face the prospect of having to work with entire texts, rather than individual sentences.
While it is clear that text must have useful structure, its nature may be less clear, making
it more diffcult to exploit in applications. This survey of work on discourse structure thus
provides a primer on bases along which discourse is structured, along with some of their
formal properties. It then lays out the current state-of-the-art with respect to algorithms
for recognizing these different structures, and how these algorithms are currently being
used in LT applications. After identifying resources that should prove useful in improving
algorithm performance across a range of languages, we conclude by speculating on future
discourse structure enabled technology.