Extended person-machine interface
Artificial Intelligence
Towards a Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse
Towards a Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse
How to interface to advisory systems? Users request help with a very simple language
CHI '88 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
User-system dialogues and the notion of focus
The Knowledge Engineering Review
EACL '89 Proceedings of the fourth conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Long distance pronominalisation and global focus
COLING '98 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 1
The structure of user-adviser dialogues: is there method in their madness?
ACL '86 Proceedings of the 24th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
A centering approach to pronouns
ACL '87 Proceedings of the 25th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Utilizing visual attention for cross-modal coreference interpretation
CONTEXT'05 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Modeling and Using Context
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Anaphora resolution is the process of determining the referent of anaphors, such as definite noun phrases and pronouns, in a discourse. Computational linguists, in modeling the process of anaphora resolution. have proposed the notion of focusing. Focusing is the process, engaged in by a reader of selecting a subset of the discourse items and making them highly available for further computations. This paper provides a cognitive basis for anaphora resolution and focusing. Human memory is divided into a short-term, an operating, and a long-term memory. Short-term memory can only contain a small number of meaning units and its retrieval time is fast. Short-term memory is divided into a cache and a buffer. The cache contains a subset of meaning units expressed in the previous sentences and the buffer holds a representation of the incoming sentence. Focusing is realized in the cache that contains a subset of the most topical units and a subset of the most recent units in the text. The information stored in the cache is used to integrate the incoming sentence with the preceding discourse. Pronouns should be used to refer to units in focus. Operating memory contains a very large number of units but its retrieval time is slow. It contains the previous text units that are not in the cache. It comprises the text units not in focus. Definite noun phrases should be used to refer to units not in focus. Two empirical studies are described that demonstrate the cognitive basis for focusing, the use of definite noun pphrases to refer to antecedents not in focus. and the use of pronouns to refer to antecedents in focus.