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Multiple Discourse Connectives in a Lexicalized Grammar For Discourse

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Computing Meaning

Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 77))

Abstract

Lexicalized grammars1 such as TAG (Joshi, 1987; XTAG-Group, 1998) and CCG (Steedman, 1996) have been very successful in showing how clauselevel syntax and semantics project from the lexicon. What drives the current enterprise is the hypothesis that the same can be shown true, at some level, for discourse syntax and semantics. Here we demonstrate our initial effort to

  • — extend a lexicalized grammar (LTAG) to discourse;

  • — use the same compositional semantics on syntactic structure that is used in lexicalized grammars (Steedman, 1996; Stone and Doran, 1997; Stone and Webber, 1998; Joshi and Vijay-Shanker, 1999);

  • — extend to discourse connectives the idea that the meaning of a lexical element can involve an anaphoric link to the previous discourse;

  • — exploit similar inference mechanisms for defeasible aspects of both sentence-level and discourse semantics.

This chapter is based on the paper that originally appeared in the Proceedings of IWCS-3 (Webber et al., 1999a); it has been updated in light of simplications that have been realised throught further work (Webber et al., 1999b; Webber et al., 1999c; Webber et al., 2000).

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Webber, B., Knott, A., Joshi, A. (2001). Multiple Discourse Connectives in a Lexicalized Grammar For Discourse. In: Bunt, H., Muskens, R., Thijsse, E. (eds) Computing Meaning. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 77. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0572-2_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0572-2_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0451-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-010-0572-2

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