Parsimonious and Profligate Approaches to the Question of Discourse Structure Relations.

Abstract

To computationalists investigating the structure of coherent discourse, the following questions have become increasingly important over the past few years: Can one describe the structure of discourse using interclausal relations? If so, what interclausal relations are there? How many are required? A fair amount of controversy exists, ranging from the parsimonious position (that two intentional relations suffice) to the profligate position (that an open-ended set of semantic/rhetorical relations is required). This paper outlines the arguments and then summarizes a survey of the conclusions of approximately 25 researchers -- from linguists to computational linguists to philosophers to Artificial Intelligence workers. It classifies the more than 350 relations they have proposed into a hierarchy of increasingly semantic relations, and argues that though the hierarchy is open-ended in one dimension, it is bounded in the other and therefore does not give rise to narchy. Evidence for the hierarchy is mentioned, and its relations (which are rhetorical and semantic in nature) are shown to be complementary to the two intentional relations proposed by the parsimonious position.

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