Baldridge, J. and A. Lascarides [2005] Annotating Discourse Structure for Robust Semantic Interpretation, Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS), Tilberg The Netherlands.
To date, no one has demonstrated the feasibility of automatically learning a comprehensive model of discourse interpretation that integrates seamlessly with representations fo compositional semantics for individual sentences. Current approaches are either too imprecise in terms of the semantic import they assign to discourse-level information, or too complex to represent and compute efficiently.
Our approach to practical discourse interpretation begins with a reduced form of SDRT. Because SDRT analyses are created by referencing multiple, possibly redundant information sources, a large part of an analysis is encoded via discourse segmentation and rhetorical relations alone. SDRT's semantic interpretation of this yields information about the contextually-determined content of utterances. Resolving discourse structure is thus an important step in producing the full contextually-determined information states for dialogs. However, producing full-fledged SDRT discourse structures is complex. To simplify this task, we define a tree-form of discourse structures which can be created more efficiently, both by human annotators and discourse parsers.
@inproceedings{baldridge:lascarides:2005,
author = {Jason Baldridge and Alex Lascarides},
year = {2005},
title = {Annotating Discourse Structures for Robust Semantic Interpretation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS)},
address = {Tilburg, The Netherlands}
}