Abstract
It is now a standard view that candidate referents are ranked according to their accessibility, based on either or both of the discourse structure and organisation of general knowledge. Various models of reference resolution based on such a view, including centering theory, have been ardently pursued and tested empirically, and the ones which are computationally workable have been given preferences in the past. In this paper, I propose an alternative view on accessibility ranking based on the consideration of relevance. Although it has not been tested computational• •, certain advantages over existing discourse-based approaches are demonstrated. It is suggested that one possible start to test the present approach computationally is to focus on the use of discourse connectives which constrain contextual assumptions by directing the way an utterance is likely to achieve relevance.
This is a revised version of the paper presented at the workshop of the Relation of Discourse/Dialogue Structure and Reference, ACL ’99. I would like to thank the participants of the workshop for their invaluable comments. I would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their encouragements and helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. All remaining inadequacies are mine.
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Matsui, T. (1999). On the Role of Context in Relevance-Based Accessibility Ranking of Candidate Referents. In: Bouquet, P., Benerecetti, M., Serafini, L., Brézillon, P., Castellani, F. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1688. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48315-2_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48315-2_18
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