Towards
Discourse Meaning
Aravind K. Joshi
University
of Pennsylvania
Abstract:
Computing sentence meanings is a daunting task. Computing discourse meaning is
an even more daunting task. One of the successful strategies adopted at the
sentence level is to first get at that part of the meaning which is encoded in
the predicate argument structures associated with verbs. This approach can be
lifted up to the level of discourse by treating discourse connectives as higher
level predicates. We will describe some recent work in the development of
annotated corpora encoding the predicate argument structures at this level. We
will briefly discuss the relevance of this level of discourse meaning towards
some computational linguistic applications.