Referential expressions: a centering approach
My interest is in applying insights from theories of discourse
coherence such as centering [Grosz, Joshi, Weinstein 1995] to
the interpretation and generation of referring expressions.
Initially, the focus of my work was on the alternation of
different referential expressions in Italian, more specifically the
two pronominal systems of weak (null subject and clitics) and strong
pronouns (overt stressable pronouns), and full noun phrases. My
analysis provides some insights into the resolution of pronominal
references during sentence processing: for example, it is the context
up to and including the verbal complex that helps to disambiguate a
null subject. I have also been investigating how such analysis
extends to various types of referential expressions in a variety of
naturally occurring texts of different genres.
Currently, I am collaborating with Dr. Massimo Poesio of the
University of Essex, UK (with initial support from the National
Science Foundation, award 9996195, and from NATO Scientific
programme). We are studying the effect of discourse structure on
referring expressions. Specifically, the effect on referring
expressions of intentional structure, i.e., the structure induced in
the text by the purposes the speaker has in mind, and informational
relations, i.e., how the described events are correlated at the domain
level (e.g., by causality).
Publications
- Massimo Poesio,
Amrita Patel, Barbara Di
Eugenio. Discourse Structure and Anaphora in Tutorial Dialogues:
an Empirical Analysis of two Theories of the Global Focus.
Research on Language and Computation (to appear, 2006).
- Massimo Poesio,
Rosemarie Stevenson, Barbara Di
Eugenio and Janet Hitzeman. Centering: a parametric theory and
its instantiations. Computational Linguistics 30(3),
pp. 309-363, 2004.[.pdf]
- Massimo Poesio and Barbara Di Eugenio. Discourse
Structure
and Anaphoric Accessibility (powerpoint presentation). ESSLLI2001 Workshop on Information
Structure, Discourse Structure and Discourse Semantics,
Helsinki, Finland, 2001
- Barbara Di Eugenio. Centering in
Italian. Centering in Discourse,
Marilyn Walker, Aravind K. Joshi, Ellen F. Prince
editors, Oxford University Press. 1998
- Barbara Di Eugenio. The discourse functions of Italian subjects: a
centering approach. Proceedings 17th
International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING96,
Copenhagen, Denmark.
- Barbara Di Eugenio. Centering theory and the Italian pronominal system. Proceedings 13th
International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING90,
Helsinki, Finland.