Japanese Discourse and the Process of Centering

Japanese Discourse and the Process of Centering (1994)

Cached

Download Links

Other Repositories/Bibliography

DBLP

by Marilyn Walker , Masayo Iida , Sharon Cote

Venue:	COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
Citations:	57 - 5 self

Versions

Version History

Metadata Version 3

User correction supplied by SystemCorrections

Datum	Value	Source
TITLE	Japanese Discourse	user correction - Legacy Corrections
AUTHOR NAME	And The Process	user correction - Legacy Corrections
AUTHOR NAME	Marilyn Walker	user correction - Legacy Corrections
AUTHOR AFFIL	University of Pennsylvania Stanford University University of Pennsylvania	user correction - Legacy Corrections
AUTHOR NAME	Masayo Iida	user correction - Legacy Corrections
AUTHOR AFFIL	University of Pennsylvania Stanford University University of Pennsylvania	user correction - Legacy Corrections
AUTHOR NAME	Sharon Cote	user correction - Legacy Corrections
AUTHOR AFFIL	University of Pennsylvania Stanford University University of Pennsylvania	user correction - Legacy Corrections
ABSTRACT	This paper has three aims: (1) to generalize a computational account of the discourse process called CENTERING, (2) to apply this account to discourse processing in Japanese so that it can be used in computational systems for machine translation or language understanding, and (3) to provide some insights on the effect of syntactic factors in Japanese on discourse interpretation. We argue that while discourse interpretation is an inferential process, syntactic cues constrain this process, and demonstrate this argument with respect to the interpretation of ZEROS, unexpressed arguments of the verb, in Japanese. The syntactic cues in Japanese discourse that we investigate are the morphological markers for grammatical TOPIC, the postposition wa, as well as those for grammatical functions such as SUBJECT, ga, OBJECT, o and OBJECT2, ni. In addition, we investigate the role of speaker's EMPATHY, which is the viewpoint from which an event is described. This is syntactically indicated through the use of verbal compounding, i.e. the auxiliary use of verbs such as kureta, kita. Our results are based on a survey of native speakers of their interpretation of short discourses, consisting of minimal pairs, varied by one of the above factors. We demonstrate that these syntactic cues do indeed affect the interpretation of ZEROS, but that having previously been the TOPIC and being realized as a ZERO also contributes to the salience of a discourse entity. We propose a discourse rule of ZERO TOPIC ASSIGNMENT, and show that CENTERING provides constraints on when a ZERO can be interpreted as the ZERO TOPIC	user correction - Legacy Corrections
YEAR	1994	INFERENCE
VENUE	Computational Linguistics	INFERENCE
VENUE TYPE	JOURNAL	INFERENCE
PAGES	193--232	INFERENCE
VOLUME	20	INFERENCE
CITATIONS	75 found	ParsCit 1.0