6.892: Computational Models of Discourse

Instructor: Regina Barzilay, G468 Stata Center
Office Hours: Wednesdays 2-3:30, or by appointment
Time & Location: MW 10-11:30am, 4-265

The syllabus is still subject to change.

Date	Topic	Reading
2/4	Introduction [slides] [pdf]	Barbara J. Grosz, Martha E. Pollack, and Candace L. Sidner. Discourse. In M. L. Posner, editor, Foundations of Cognitive Science, pp. 437-467. The MIT Press, 1989. Bonnie L. Webber. Computational Perspectives on Discourse and Dialog. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen and H. E. Hamilton, editors, The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, pp. 798-817. Blackwell Publishing, 2001. Johanna D. Moore & Peter Wiemer-Hastings. Discourse in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. In A. G. Graesser, M. A. Gernbacher and S. R. Goldman, editors, Handbook of Discourse Processes, pp. 439-487. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2003. Walter Kintsch. The representation of meaning in memory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. S.E. Haviland and H. H. Clark. What's new? Acquiring new information as a process in comprehension. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, pp. 515-521, 1974. Terry Winograd, SHRDLU.
2/9	Topic Segmentation: Agreement, Evaluation, automatic text segmentation [slides] [pdf]	Marti Hearst Multi-paragraph segmentation of expository text Proceedings of the ACL, pp. 9-16, 1994. Lev Pevzner and Marti Hearst A Critique and Improvement of an Evaluation Metric for Text Segmentation Computational Linguistics, pp. 9-16, 1994. Rebecca J. Passonneau and Diane J. Litman Intention-based Segmentation: Human Reliability and correlation with linguistic cues Proceedings of the ACL, pp. 148-155, 1993. Barbara Grosz and Julia Hirschberg Some intonational charachteristics of discourse. Proceeding of the ICSLP, 1992.
2/11	Topic Segmentation (cont.): Hierarchical Text Segmentation, Meeting Segmentation [slides] [pdf]	Yaacov Yaari Segmentation of expository texts by hierarchical agglomerative clustering Proceedings of the RANLP'97, 1997. P. van Mulbregt and I. Carp and L. Gillick and S. Lowe and J. Yamron Segmentation of Automatically Transcribed Broadcast News Text Proceedings of the ICASSP Michel Galley, Kathleen McKeown, Eric Fosler-Lussier and Hongyan Jing Discourse Segmentation of Multi-Party Conversation Proceedings of the ACL, 2003.
2/17	Cohesion and Local Coherence: Lexical Chains, Centering Theory; Applications to Automated Essay Scoring [slides] [pdf]	Barbara Grosz, Aravind Joshi and Scott Weinstein Centering: A Framework for Modelling the Local Coherence of Discourse. Computational Linguistics 21(2), pp. 203-225, 1995. Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan Cohesion in English London: Longman, 1976. Jane Morris and Graeme Hirst Lexical Cohesion Computed by Thesaural Relations as an Indicator of the Structure of Text . Computational Linguistics 17(1), pp. 21-48, 1991. Peter Foltz, Walter Kintsch and Thomas Landauer The Measurement of Textual Coherence with Latent Semantic Analysis. Discourse Processes, 25(2), pp. 285-307, 1998. Eleni Miltsakaki and Karen Kukich The Role of Centering Theory's Rough-Shift in the Teaching and Evaluation of Writing Skills Proceedings of the ACL, 2002. Regina Barzilay and Michael Elhadad Using Lexical Chains for Text Summarization Proceedings of the Intelligent Scalable Text Summarization Workshop, 1997
2/18	Automatic Reference Resolution [slides] [pdf]	Andrew Keller Discourse in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. In Daniel Jurafsky and James Martin, Speech and Language Processing, pp. 671-684, Prentice-Hall, 2000. Shalom Lappin and Herbert Leass An Algorithm for Pronominal Anaphora Resolution. Computational Linguistics 20(4), pp. 536-561, 1994. Claire Cardie and Kiri Wagstaff Noun Phrase Coreference as Clustering Proceedings of the EMNLP and VLC, 1999 Wee Meng Soon, Daniel Chung Yong Lim and Hwee Tou Ng A Machine Learning Approach to Coreference Resolution of Noun Phrases Computational Linguistics 27(4), pp. 521-544, 2001. Vincent Ng and Claire Cardie Improving Machine Learning Approaches to Coreference Resolution Proceedings of the ACL, 2002. Vincent Ng Machine Learning for Coreference Resolution: Recent Successes and Future Directions. Cornell University Technical Report CUL.CIS/TR2003-1918, 2003.
2/23	Automatic Reference Resolution and Reference Generation [slides] [pdf]	Christoph Mueller, Stefan Rapp and Michael Strube Applying Co-Training to Reference Resolution Proceedings of the ACL, 2002. Vincent Ng and Claire Cardie Weakly Supervised Natural Language Learning Without Redundant Views Proceedings of NAACL-HLT, 2003. Niyu Ge and John Hale and Eugene Charniak A Statistical Approach to Anaphora Resolution Proceedings of WVLC, 1998. Jerry Hobbs Resolving pronoun references Lingua, 44, 1978. Marilyn A. Walker Evaluating Discourse Processing Algorithms Proceedings of the ACL, 1989. Michael Strube and Christoph Muller A Machine Learning Approach to Pronoun Resolution in Spoken Dialogue Proceedings of the ACL, 2003. Donna Byron Resolving Pronominal Reference to Abstract Entities Proceedings of the ACL, 2002.
3/25	Generation of Referring Expressions [slides] [pdf]	Willem Levelt Speaking: From Intentions to Articulation MIT Press, 1989. Robert Dale Cooking Up Referring Expressions Proceedings of the ACL, 1989. Ehud Reiter and Robert Dale A Fast Algorithm for the Generation of Referring Expressions Proceedings of the COLING, 2002. Dragomir Radev Learning Correlations between Linguistic Indicators and Semantic Constraints: Reuse of Context-Dependent Descriptions of Entities Proceedings of the ACL/COLING, 1998. Ani Nenkova and Kathleen McKeown References to Named Entities: a Corpus Study Proceedings of the NAACL/HLT, 2003 (Companion Volume).
3/1	Domain-dependent Models of Text Structure [slides] [pdf]	Simone Teufel and Marc Moens What's yours and what's mine: Determining Intellectual Attribution in Scientific Text Proceedings of the EMNLP and VLC, 2000 Pablo Duboue and Kathleen R. McKeown Empirically Estimating Order Constraints for Content Planning in Generation Proceeding of the ACL/EACL, 2001. Regina Barzilay and Lillian Lee Catching the Drift: Probabilistic Content Models, with Applications to Generation and Summarization Proceedings of the NAACL/HLT, 2004 (to appear).
3/3	Rhetorical Structure Theory (guest speaker Florian Wolf) First part of the project due [slides] [pdf]	William Mann and Sandra Thompson Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional thoery of text organization Text 8(3), 1988 Daniel Marcu Building Up Rhetorical Structure Trees Proceeding of the AAAI, 1996 Daniel Marcu and Abdessamad Echihabi An Unsupervised Approach to Recognizing Discourse Relations Proceeding of the ACL/NAACL, 2002 Florian Wolf's Presentation
3/8	Discourse Structure in Text Summarization; Alignment [slides] [pdf]	Julian Kupiec and Jan O. Pedersen and Francine Chen A Trainable Document Summarizer Proceedings of the SIGIR, 1995. Dan Melamed A Portable Algorithm for Mapping Bitext Correspondence. Proceedings of ACL, 1997. William A. Gale and Kenneth Ward Church A Program for Aligning Sentences in Bilingual Corpora Proceedings of the ACL, 1991 Daniel Marcu The automatic construction of large-scale corpora for summarization research Proceedings of the SIGIR, 1999 Regina Barzilay and Noemie Elhadad Sentence Alignment for Monolingual Comparable Corpora Proceedings of EMNLP, 2003 Document Understanding Conference (2004)
3/10	Temporal Ordering in Discourse [slides] [pdf]	H. Reichnbach The Elements of Symbolic Logic The Free Press, New York, NY, 1947 Bonnie L. Webber Tense as discourse anaphor Computational Linguistics, 14(2), 1988 Alex Lascarides and Nicholas Asher Temporal Interpretation, Discourse Relations and Commonsense Entailment Linguistics and Philosophy, 16(5), 1993 Inderjeet Mani and George Wilson Robust Temporal Processing of the News Proceedings of the ACL, 2003 Inderjeet Mani, Barry Schiffman and Jianping Zhang Inferring Temporal ordering of the Events in News Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL, 2003 Mirella Lapata and Alex Lascaridis Inferring Sentence Internal Temporal Information Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL, 2004
3/17	Prosody and Discourse Guest Speaker: Chao Wang	S. Shattuck-Hufnagel and A. Turk A prosody tutorial for investigators of auditory sentence processing Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 25, 193-247, 1996 Ken Chen and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson An Automatic Prosody Labeling System Using ANN-Based Syntactic-Prosodic Model and GMM-Based Acoustic-Prosodic Model ICASSP, 2004
3/29	Intentions and the Structure of Discourse [slides] [pdf]	Barbara Grosz and Candace L. Sidner Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse Computational Linguistics, 12(3), 175-204, 1986 A problem for RST: The need for multi-level discourse analysis A need for RST: The need for multi-level discourse analysis Computational Linguistics, 18(4), 537-544, 1992
3/31	Studies of Dialogues; Taxonomy of Speech Acts [slides] [pdf]	S. Levinson Pragmatics Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983 H. Sacks, E. Schegloff and G. Jefferson A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation Language, 50(4), 696-735 Julia Hirschberg and Diane Litman Empirical studies on the disambiguation of cue phrases Computational Linguistics, 19(3), 501-530 H. P. Grice Further Notes on Logic and conversation In P. Cole (Editor), Speech Acts: Syntax and Semantics Volume 9, pp. 113-127, 1978 J. L. Austin How to do Things with Words Harvard University Press, 1962 J. Allen and M. Cofe Draft of DAMSL: Dialog Act Markup in Several Layers J. R. Searle Expression and Meaning: Studies in the theory of Speech Acts Cambridge University Press, 1979
4/5	Automatic Interpretation of Dialogue Acts [slides] [pdf]	A. Stolcke, N. Coccaro, R. Bates, P. Taylor, C. Van Ess-Dykema, K. Ries, E. Shriberg, D. Jurafsky, R. Martin and M. Meteer Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech Computatuinal Linguistics, vol. 26, 3, 2000
4/7	Learning Dialogue Strategies via Reinforcement Learning [slides] [pdf]	E. Levin, R. Pieraccini and W. Eckert A Stochastic Model of Human-machine Interaction for Learning Dialog Strategies, IEEE Transactions on speech and audio processing, vol. 8, No. 1, 2000 S. Singh, M.Kearns, D. Litman, M. Walker Reinforcement Learning for Spoken Dialogue Systems Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 12, MIT Press, 2000 M. A. Walker, J. C. Fromer and S. Narayanan Learning Optimal Dialogue Strategies: A Case Study of a Spoken Dialogue Agent for Email Proceedings of the ACL-COLING, 1998
4/12	MIT Dialogue Systems Second part of the project due
4/14	Dialogue Systems [slides] [pdf]	M. Walker, I. Langkilde, J. Wright, A. Gorin and D. Litman Learning to Predict Problematic Situations in a Spoken Dialogue System: Experiments with How May I Help You? Proceedings of NAACL, 2000 D. J. Litman, M. A. Walker and M. S. Kearns Automatic Detection of Poor Speech Recognition at the Dialogue Level Proceedings of ACL, 1999 A. L. Gorin, G. Riccardi and J. H. Wright How May I Help You? Speech Communications, 23 (1/2), 113-127, 1997 D. J. Litman and S. Pan Designing and Evaluating an Adaptive Spoken Dialogue System User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Vol. 12, No. 2/3, pp. 111-137, 2002 M. Kearns, C. Isbell, S. Singh, D. Litman and J. Howe CobotDS: A Spoken Dialogue System for Chat Proceedings of AAAI, 2002
4/21	Plan Recognition [slides] [pdf]	N. Lesh, C. Rich and C. L. Sidner Using Plan Recognition in Human-Computer Collaboration Merl Technical Report, 1998 R. Goldman, C. W. Geib and C. A. Miller A New Model of Plan Recognition Proceedings of UAI, 1999 E. Charniak and R.P. Goldman A Bayesian model of plan recognition Artificial Intelligence, 64(1):53-79, 1993 M. Vilain Getting serious about parsing plans: A grammatical analysis of plan recognition Proceedings of AAAI, 190-197, 1990 H. Kautz and J. Allen Generalized plan recognition Proceedings of AAAI, 32-38, 1986
4/26	Evaluation for Discourse Processing
4/28	Discourse in Psycholinguistics
5/5	TBA Last part of the project due
5/10	Project Presentations
5/12	Project Presentations