The use of syntactic clues in discourse processing

Authors:
Nan Decker
Affiliations:
Cincinnati, Ohio
Venue:
ACL '85 Proceedings of the 23rd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Year:
1985

Citing 2
Cited 1

Natural Language Information Processing: A Computer Grammmar of English and Its Applications

Natural Language Information Processing: A Computer Grammmar of English and Its Applications
Syntactic clues to discourse structure: a case from journalism

Syntactic clues to discourse structure: a case from journalism

Transitivity and foregrounding in news articles: experiments in information retrieval and automatic summarising

ACL '96 Proceedings of the 34th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics

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Abstract

The desirability of a syntactic parsing component in natural language understanding systems has been the subject of debate for the past several years. This paper describes an approach to automatic text processing which is entirely based on syntactic form. A program is described which processes one genre of discourse, that of newspaper reports. The program creates summaries of reports by relying on an expanded concept of text grounding: certain syntactic structures and tense/aspect pairs indicate the most important events in a news story. Supportive, background material is also highly coded syntactically. Certain types of information are routinely expressed with distinct syntactic forms. Where more than one episode occurs in a single report, a change of episode will also be marked syntactically in a reliable way.