Grosz, B.J.. Focusing and Description in Natural Language Dialogues. In Joshi, A., Webber, B., and Sag, I. (eds) Elements of Discourse Understanding. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....in Figure 2. The answer is that these two relations express information that is independent of the rhetorical semantic meanings of the relations in the taxonomy and only apply in discourses with intentional, plan like nature. They derive from early work on a highly plan oriented domain [Grosz 81] in which plan steps preconditions led to underlying precedence orderings of plan steps and satisfaction of subgoals which were dominated by supergoals. However, not all discourse is plan like; a large proportion of everyday close discourse between people achieves goals for which, it can be ....

Grosz, B.J.. Focusing and Description in Natural Language Dialogues. In Joshi, A., Webber, B., and Sag, I. (eds) Elements of Discourse Understanding. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981.

....then proceed to remove the flywheel. What the expert is accomplishing through the utterance of (1) by using the noun phrase the wheelpuller cannot be fully explained by treating definite referring expressions simply as descriptions that are uniquely true of some ob ject, even taking focusing [7][11] into account. The expert uses the wheelpuller to refer to an object that in fact uniquely fits the description predicated of it, so this simple analysis is incapable of accounting for the effects the expert intends his utterance to have. If one takes the knowledge and intentions of the ....

Grosz, Barbara J., Focusing and Description in Natural Language Dialogs, in Joshi et al. (eds.), Elements of Discourse Understanding: Proceedings of a Workshop on Computational Aspects of Linguistic Structure and Discourae Settins, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980.

....for example, to control or shift attention during comprehension. As we noted in section 3.2, focus is an important notion in a discourse model, since it influences many aspects of language analysis and production. For example, focus can be used to disambiguate definite descriptions and anaphora [Grosz81]. Figure 3.5 gives an example of the disambiguation of a definite description using a focusing gesture. Without focus the definite description the A is ambiguous in the given visual context, since three objects are visible which could be referred to as A (one in each row of the table ....

Grosz, B. 1981. Focusing and Description in Natural Language Dialogues. In Joshi, A., Webber, B., and Sag, I. (eds.) Elements of Discourse Understanding. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, pp. 84-105.

....Agent. Interesting Plans from the TRIPS 911 Domain Many of the plan recognition systems mentioned above were designed to be used in a speci c application. Carberry s focusing heuristics [Car90b] for example, were developed from intuition from student advising dialogues. Grosz [Gro78, Gro81] observation that dialogues tend to follow the structure of the task was obtained by looking at expert apprentice dialogues. However, what is true for one domain, may not necessarily (or to the same degree) be true in another. In student advising dialogues, people do probably tend to ush out a ....

Barbara J. Grosz. Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In A. Joshi, B. Webber, and I. Sag, editors, Elements of Discourse Understanding, pages 84-105. Cambridge University Press, New York, New York, 1981.

....consists of the user (the master) getting information from the system (the slave) Although the system may possibly ask clarification questions, it cannot take task level initiative ( Chu Caroll and Brown, 1997] and is not party to the user s planning decisions. Expertapprentice dialogues (e.g. [Grosz, 1981]) also fit this model. In these, the expert is the master, and the apprentice only follows the plan the expert puts forth. This master slave assumption limits the types of collaboration which can be modeled. We are interested in modeling the entire spectrum of collaboration paradigms, from ....

Barbara J. Grosz, "Focusing and Description in Natural Language Dialogues, " In A. Joshi, B. Webber, and I. Sag, editors, Elements of Discourse Understanding, pages 84--105. Cambridge University Press, New York, New York, 1981.

....and dialogues, researchers identified relations such as elaboration, justification, and exemplification. Other work analyzed the issue of focus of attention i.e. what entities were being discussed at any given point and how focus shifted throughout the course of a task oriented dialogue [23]. Grosz Sidner [24] presented an influential model that unified work on focus of attention, discourse or linguistic structure, and discourse intentions. Litman [25, 26] extended plan recognition models to handle dialogue and also integrated the use of linguistic information. Work on what makes a ....

Grosz, B J `Focusing and Description in Natural Language Dialogues' in Joshi, A, Webber, B, and Sag, I (Eds.) Elements of Discourse Understanding, Cambridge University Press, UK (1981)

....each other with occasional collaboration. The resulting structure of the dialogue will mirror the structure of the task as observed by Grosz [8] By having participants attempting to follow the same plan, the dialogue maintains a narrow focus, an observed property of human collaborative dialogues [6, 9]. 2 An implementation of the Collaborative Algorithm has been used as a testbed to develop and evaluate theories of dialogue structure, variable initiative, negotiation and summarizing statements [14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 3] Using a random distribution of domain and user modeling knowledge, over ....

B.J. Grosz. Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In A. Joshi, Webber B., and I. Sag, editors, Elements of Discourse Understanding, pages 84-- 105. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1981.

....the DC. Grosz coined the term focus [Grosz1977] for the local context. It is important to have a system for language understanding track some notion of the focus, because in many cases the system can use the focus to severely restrict the candidate set of items from which to choose an antecedent [Grosz1981] Various theories attempt to establish a psychologically plausible size and organization for the focus set, and account for how items move to this set from main memory and back [Ariel1990; Grosz1977; Hawkins1991; Walker1996] Recency (the linguistic structure [Grosz and Sidner1986] obviously ....

....focus, a breadth first search of the semantic net is conducted. Focus information is used to limit the number of deductions made and limit the search space considered in the process of matching a referring expression to an object in the semantic net. Her algorithm only resolves definite reference. Grosz [Grosz1981] 22 has a separate process for tracking implicitly focused objects so that they don t clutter the focus and weaken its highlighting function. Another reason for treating implicitly focused objects differently is because it is useful to recognize a reference to an implicitly focused object as a ....

Barbara J. Grosz. 1981. Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In Aravind K. Joshi, Bonnie Lynn Webber, and Ivan Sag, editors, Elements of Discourse Understanding, pages 84--105. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

....been been conjoined using and ) Linguistic and computational investigations reveal strong constraints on what material may occupy the focus position as a text progresses. Three so called focus shift rules expressing these constraints were formulated by Sidner [Sidner 83] see also [Grosz 77, Grosz 81] These rules are however not sensitive to discourse structure, and when used for text generation more specific rules are needed. For the TEXT generator, for example, McKeown had to add an additional focus shift rule [McKeown 85] Later, McCoy and Cheng generalized the linear operation of focus ....

Grosz, B.J. 1981. Focusing and Description in Natural Language Dialogues. In Elements of Discourse Understanding. Joshi, A., Webber, B., and Sag, I. (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

....or when trying to identify a referent of a referring expression, the context in which it is uttered is very important. The context allows some objects to be referred to by pronouns or by definite descriptions that do not fully distinguish the object from all other objects that could be referred to (Grosz, 1981). But this thesis addresses the issue of referring to objects that are not in focus, and hence does not consider context. However, a primitive model of context could be incorporated into our work on the basis of sets of objects that are in focus. An interesting problem would be to integrate ....

Grosz, B. J. (1981). Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In Joshi, A. K., Webber, B. L., and Sag, I., editors, Elements of Discourse Understanding, pages 84--105. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

....in our model For our approach, we do not deal with low level aspects of visual perception (cf. Marr 82] but we start on a higher level where specific areas in the current visual field are focussed on. This is similar to the focussing technique used in linguistically oriented approaches (e.g. Grosz 81] The current focus defines an inner visual field, in which we can identify, categorize and select distinct objects. The current visual focus determines the main landmarks which are used in the presentation: Visual perception leads communication. If the visually accessed information is not ....

B. J. Grosz. Focusing and Description in Natural Language Dialogues. In: A. Joshi, B. L. Webber, and I. A. Sag (eds.), Elements of Discourse Understanding, pp. 84--105. Cambridge, London: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

....caveat that discourses have internal structure and may themselves include sub discourses in each of which some discourse entity may be initial. Clearly, for this constraint to be formalized, one needs a theory that keeps track of the history of entities within a discourse, e.g. Focusing (Grosz 1977, 1981, Sidner 1983) or Centering (Joshi and Weinstein 1981, Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein 1987) Elsewhere, I am attempting to provide a formal account of ES sentences with postposed subjects, among other syntactic phenomena, in a Centering framework (Prince, In prep. For the present however, I should ....

Grosz, B. 1981. Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In Joshi, A.K., Webber, B.L., and Sag, I.A., eds. Elements of discourse understanding.

....the agent is acting in the domain. It is interactive in that the agent may request instruction as needed to complete tasks or to understand aspects of the domain or of previous instructions. This type of instruction is common in dialogues between experts and apprentices working on various tasks [Grosz, 1980; Grosz, 1977] A segment of tutorial instruction, given to the Instructo Soar agent within a robotic domain, is shown in Figure 1.1. Tutorial instruction can be viewed as a way of incrementally eliciting knowledge from an instructor. It has a number of properties that make this elicitation easy ....

....Even if these types of constructions are disallowed, two difficult problems in interactive instruction are referent resolution and incompleteness. Referent resolution determining what a noun phrase refers to has been the topic of multiple Ph.D. theses (e.g. Gershman, 1979; Grosz, 1977] Grosz [1980,1977] specifically targeted referent resolution in expert apprentice dialogues. Many standard reference problems appear in the sample instructions that have been collected, such as anaphors, comparatives and superlatives, generics, references to composite constructions, and episodic references. ....

Barbara J. Grosz. Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In A. K. Joshi, I. A. Sag, and B. L. Webber, editors, Elements of discourse understanding: Proceedings of a workshop on computational aspects of linguistic structure and discourse setting, pages 84--105. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1980.

....card. By pointing the loci of update, topic management acts structure the information update. In each case, topic management aims at restricting the discussion on a certain entity, its directly associated entities, and the information that is requested, asserted, etc. about it in the conversation (Grosz (1981), Sidner (1983) As a result, the topic serves as a context or a framework for information update 152 Information Update in Dutch Information Dialogues 4379 1 I: Informatie Schiphol Schiphol Information 2 S: Ja, goedemo. middag Yes, good mo. afternoon mevrouw madam 3 Kunt u mij ....

Grosz, B. (1981). Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In A. Joshi, B. Webber, and I. Sag (Eds.), Elements of Discourse Understanding, pp. 84--105. Cambridge University Press.

....Expressions like here are notoriously vague as to the borders surrounding the locale close to the speaker. The failure of inserting coordinates into semantic representations ( Levinson, 1983] is probably due to such examples. But many other examples, not as well known, are not hard to find. [Grosz, 1981] examined deictic references, and concluded that focus is a key notion in reference resolution. Focus, of course, is a discourse notion, independent of the speech event physical situation. Thus, the two screws in her data referred to different objects depending on the stage of the conversation, ....

Barbara J Grosz. Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. pages 84--105. 1981.

....linguistic knowledge are not always sufficient for reference resolution: reference may dependent upon which object (from either the linguistic or graphical modalities) is most salient in context. In the discourse model, objects can be ordered in terms of saliency to yield the focus of a discourse (Grosz, 1981). For example, in Figure 2 if the previous utterance had been create a house, then the referent of it in paint it red can be resolved as the discourse object house, assuming that this is the most salient object. Since computer systems lack the detailed ontological and linguistic knowledge of ....

Grosz, B.J., "Focusing and description in natural language dialogues," in Elements of discourse understanding, Joshi, A.K., Webber, B.L., and Sag, I.A., Eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

....to remain consistent through the discourse. The notion of structuring a discourse model in terms of domains derives from research which investigated the relation between an anaphoric expression, such as a pronoun, in a sentence and its antecedent within the discourse (cf. Grosz 1977; Sidner 1979; Grosz 1981; Grosz et al. 1983; Dale 1990) For example, with the generation of anaphoric expressions in the epicure generation system, the discourse model is organized into three domains: a local focus domain which contains linguistic information about the current and previous utterances; a global focus ....

Grosz, B. J. (1981). Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In A. K. Joshi, B. L. Webber, and I. A. Sag, editors, Elements of discourse understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

....the example involves the production of sound waves, which provide information to the audience about the direction from which they come. is described (even more clearly) as perceptual, but theorized about as intellectual, occurs in the artificial intelligence (AI) literature. AI researchers (e.g. Grosz ( Grosz, 1981] : 90) Cohen ( Cohen, 1984] 208) Goodman ( Goodman, 1986] 277) Appelt and Kronfeld ( Appelt and Kronfeld, 1987] 642 643) Lesperance ( Lesperance, 1993] despite their claims that certain types of reference are perceptual, represent reference by using serial devices for exact feature ....

Barbara J. Grosz. Focusing and Description in Natural Language Dialogues. In Aravind Joshi, Bonnie Lynn Webber, and Ivan A. Sag, editors, Elements of Discourse Understanding, pages 84--105. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981.

....(Bos et al. 1994) Ontological and linguistic knowledge are not always sufficient for reference resolution: reference may dependent upon which objects are most salient in the discourse situation. In the discourse model, objects can be ordered in terms of saliency to yield the focus of a discourse (Grosz 1981) 3 . For example, in Figure 4 if the previous utterance had been create a house, then the referent of it in paint it 3 We return in Section 4.4.1 to the question of how focus can be determined. red can be resolved as the discourse object house, assuming that this is the most salient object. ....

Grosz, B. J. (1981). Focusing and description in natural language dialogues.

....to understanding utterances will be discussed. 5.1 Foundations of Expectation Driven Processing The foundation for this model comes from the notion of attentional state proposed in [47] by Grosz and Sidner. Their theory of discourse structure integrated research about focusing in discourse (Grosz [45]) and work on intention recognition in discourse (Allen [2] Their main idea is that discourse structure is composed of three distinct but interacting components: linguistic structure; intentional structure; and attentional state. Linguistic structure is the grouping of the utterances into the ....

B.J. Grosz. Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In A. Joshi, Webber B., and I. Sag, editors, Elements of Discourse Understanding, pages 84--105. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1981.

.... to the most salient entity in the discourse (i.e. the discourse focus) has been made by numerous researchers (e.g. van Dijk Kintsch ,1983; Gordon, Grosz, Gilliom, 1993; Gordon Scearce, 1995; Grosz, Joshi, Weinstein, 1983) and is supported by distributional analysis (Ariel, 1990; Grosz, 1981) and experimental evidence (Gordon, et al. 1993) Despite the usefulness of the accessibility scale, the psychological processes that underlie the use of anaphoric expressions remain poorly understood. The common view (e.g. Ariel, 1990; Gordon, Grosz, Gilliom, 1993; Grosz, Joshi, Weinstein, ....

....focused entities falls out of this principle and does not constitute an independent principle in and of itself. Quite obviously, pronouns have very low informational load (i.e. cost) with respect to any antecedent. Therefore, in certain contexts like task oriented dialogues like the ones used by Grosz (1981), where the main function of referring expressions is to establish successful reference, pronouns would be preferable for referring to the discourse focus. However, in other contexts, such as literary or expository texts, referring expressions may also serve to add new information, which should ....

Grosz, B. J. (1981). Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In A. K. Joshi & B.

....an utterance may depend upon the agent s knowledge of the preceding dialogue context interpretation requires more than a knowledge of the current utterance. Phenomena like supra sentential anaphora and ellipsis can only be interpreted referring to the dialogue context to which they belong (cf. [4]) Other dialogue phenomena, such as deictic expressions, require knowledge about the situational setting of the dialogue. In addition, depending upon the purpose of the dialogue, an utterance may require a non literal interpretation; e.g. in information providing dialogues, answering only yes ....

Grosz, B. J. (1981): Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In Joshi, A. K., B. L. Webber and I. A. Sag: Elements of discourse understanding, Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1981.

....global and immediate. Participants were said to be globally focused on a set of entities relevant to the overall discourse. These entities may either have been explicitly introduced into the discourse or be sufficiently closely related to such entities to be considered implicitly in focus (Grosz, 1981). In contrast, immediate focusing referred to a more local focusing process, one that relates to identifying the entity that an individual utterance most centrally concerns. Sidner (1979) provided a detailed analysis of immediate focusing, including a distinction between the current discourse ....

Grosz, B. 1981. Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In A. Joshi, B. Webber, and I. Sag, editors, Elements of Discourse Understanding, pages 85--105, Cambridge, England. Cambridge University Press.

No context found.

Barbara J. Grosz. Focusing and description in natural language dialogues. In Joshi et al. [557], pages 84--105.

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