In Coherence and Natural Language, Florian Wolf and Edward Gibson specify                  and evaluate criteria for descriptively adequate data structures for representing                  discourse coherence. They test the influence of discourse structure on pronoun                  processing, evaluate different approaches for determining the relative importance of                  document segments, and propose a new coherence-based algorithm to accomplish this                  task. Their book offers the first large-scale empirical evaluation of data                  structures for representing coherence and also includes novel psycholinguistic tests                  of existing information extraction and text summarization systems.Wolf and Gibson                  evaluate whether tree structures are descriptively adequate for representing                  discourse coherence and conclude that more powerful data structure is needed because                  there are many different kinds of crossed dependencies and nodes with multiple                  parents in the discourse structures of naturally occurring texts. They propose that                  connected, labeled chain graphs make a better representation of coherence. They find                  additionally that causal coherence relations affect people's strategies for pronoun                  processing, which points to the psychological validity of coherence relations.                  Finally, they evaluate word-based, layout-based, and coherence-based approaches for                  estimating the importance of document segments in a document and find that                  coherence-based methods that operate on chain graphs perform best. With its                  attention to empirical validation and psycholinguistic processing, the book raises                  issues that are relevant to cognitive science as well as natural language processing                  and information extraction.

Coherence in Natural Language: Data Structures and Applications (Bradford Books) PDF

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