Regina Barzilay and Mirella Lapata. Modeling Local Coherence: An Entity-based Approach. Computational Linguistics, 34:1, 1-34.

This paper proposes a novel framework for representing and measuring local coherence. Central to this approach is the entity grid representation of discourse which captures patterns of entity distribution in a text. The algorithm introduced in the paper automatically abstracts a text into a set of entity transition sequences and records distributional, syntactic, and referential information about discourse entities. We re-conceptualize coherence assessment as a learning task and show that our entity-based representation is well-suited for ranking-based generation and text classification tasks. Using the proposed representation, we achieve good performance on text ordering, summary coherence evaluation, and readability assessment.

@Article{Barzilay:Lapata:07,
  author = 	 {Regina Barzilay and Mirella Lapata},
  title = 	 {Modeling Local Coherence: An Entity-based Approach},
  journal = 	 {Computational Linguistics},
  year = 	 2007, 
  note =         {To appear}
}