tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "THE INTERPRETATION OF TENSE IN DISCOURSE"

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 | THE INTERPRETATION OF TENSE IN DISCOURSE Bonnie Lynn Webber Department of Computer Information Science University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia PA 19104-6389 Abstract This paper gives an account of the role tense plays in the listeners 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 1. Introduction My basic premise is that in processing a narrative text a listener is building up a representation of the speaker s view of the events and situations being described and of their relationship to one another. This representation which I will call an event situatlon structure or e s structure reflects the listener s best effort at interpreting the speaker s ordering of those events and situations in time and space. The listener s problem can therefore be viewed as that of establishing where in the evolving e s structure to attach the event or situation described in the next clause. My claim is that the discourse interpretation of tense contributes to the solution of this problem. This work on the discourse interpretation of tense is being carried out in the context of a larger enterprise whose goal is an account of explicit anaphoric reference to events and situations as in Example 1. Example 1 It s always been presumed that when the glaciers receded the area got very hot. The Folsum men couldn t adapt and they died out. That s what s supposed to have happened f sthe textbook dogma. But it s wrong. They were human and smart. They adapted their weapons and culture and they survived. Example 1 shows that one may refer anaphorically to structured entities built up through multiple clauses. Thus an account of how clauses arrange themselves into structures is .

• Báo cáo khoa học
• THE INTERPRETATION OF TENSE IN DISCOURSE
• Bonnie Lynn
• Long Papers
• scientific reports
• model language
• process natural language
• Dialog Control
• Natural Language System
• Dialog Control in a Natural Language System
• Expanding the Horizons
• Natural Language Interfaces
• Phil Hayes
• PROSPECTS OR PRACTICAL
• NATURAL LANGUAGE SYSTEMS
• Workshops
• NATURAL LANGUAGE
• INTERACTION WITH MACHINES
• COMPUTER INTEBFACE DESIGN MURRAY TUROFF DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER
• IiVFORMATION SCIENCE IIEW JERSEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
• EVALUATION OF NATURAL LANGUAGE
• INTERFACES TO DATABASE SYSTEMS
• A PANEL DISCUSSION
• database query system
• J
• Norwood Crout
• INTERFACES TO DATA BASE SYSTEMS
• Bozena Henisz
• INTERPRETING NATURAL LANGUAGE
• DATABASE UPDATES
• S
• Jermld Kaplan Jim David
• TRANSPORTABLE NATURAL LANGUAGE
• INTERFACES TO DATABASES
• Gary G
• Hendrlx and William H
• Lewis
• DATABASES THEORETICAL
• TECHNICAL ISSUES
• TRANSPORTABLE NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACES
• PROBLEMS AND TECHNIQUES
• Barbara J
• Grosz
• THEORETICAL TECHNICAL ISSUES
• NATURAL LANGUAGE ACCESS TO DATABASES
• R
• Petrick
• Domain Independent
• Database Access Systems
• ISSUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE
• ACCESS TO DATABASES
• A LOGIC PROGRAMMING PERSPECTIVE
• Sharon C
• Salveter David Maier
• PLANNING NATURAL LANGUAGE
• EXPRESSIONS REFERRING
• Douglas E
• Appelt
• THE TEXT SYSTEM
• NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION
• Kathleen R
• M
• MENTING A DATABASE
• KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION
• THE KEY TO THE SELECTION PROBLEM
• E
• Jeffrey Conklin David D
• McDonald
• A KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING
• NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING
• Stuart C
• Shapiro
• NATURAL LANGUAGE TEXTS
• NECESSARILY GRAMMATICAL
• EVEN COMPLETE
• UNGRAMHATICALITY
• EXTRA GRAMMATICALITY
• NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING SYSTEMS
• Taxonomy
• Descriptions
• Individuals in Natural
• Language Understanding
• The Use of Ooject Special Knowledge
• Natural Language Processing
• Mark H
• Bursteln