From Lexical Cohesion to Textual Coherence: A Data Driven Perspective

This paper presents research that connects the cohesion structure of a text to the derivation of its coherence structure. Two different algorithms that derive the cohesion structure in the form of lexical paths from large thesauri are illustrated. Their results are correlated with (1) cue phrases of discourse usage and (2) coherence constraints empirically derived. A novel model of coherence structure is devised, based on the data provided by lexical paths from real world texts. 1 Introduction The inference of the coherence structure of a text is a major natural language processing endeavor, that has been stimulating a lot of theoretical work in the 80s, and more recently, promising computational research. It has been shown that coherence-based approaches increase the accuracy of some of the most important present applications of the language technology: information extraction and textual summarization. Moreover, coherence information is an important factor in building content-based W..