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Discourse structure and language technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2011

B. WEBBER
Affiliation:
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: bonnie@inf.ed.ac.uk
M. EGG
Affiliation:
Department of English and American Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany e-mail: markus.egg@anglistik.hu-berlin.de
V. KORDONI
Affiliation:
German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) and Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Saarbrcken, Germany e-mail: kordoni@coli.uni-saarland.de

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 difficult to exploit in applications. This survey of work on discourse structure thus provides a primer on the bases of 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 Language Technology 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.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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