Since the late 70's focus-based approaches were proposed as a
theoretical alternative to heuristic approaches in discourse
processing, e.g., anaphora resolution. Though there was some effort to
apply focus-based approaches to naturally occurring discourse, it
could not be shown that focus-based algorithms produce better results
than heuristics with respect to anaphora resolution. In this talk, I
show that the attempts to apply focus-based approaches were not
successful because of the lack of the most crucial definitions: the
definitions of the basic units of analysis. Based on linguistic
evidence I provide definitions for the update and the clean-up unit
which replace the (undefined) notion of utterance used, e.g., in the
centering model. These definitions are the foundation of a new model
of attentional state which narrows the gap between focus-based models
and heuristics by combining the positive aspects of both kinds of
approaches.
Literature:
Michael Strube (1998). Never Look Back: An Alternative to Centering.
In COLING-ACL '98 (pp. 1251-1257).
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