Discourse and Dialogue

ion at which Discourse is Described: In general, approaches advocating fewer discourse relations tend to address higher levels of abstraction. Nature of Discourse Segments: A key question here is whether discourse segments have psychological reality or whether they are abstract linguistic units akin to phonemes. Recently, there have been attempts to identify the boundary features of discourse segments (Hirschberg & Grosz, 1992; Litman & Passoneau, 1993). Role of Intentions in Discourse: It is well-recognized that intentions play an important role in discourse. However, of the four predominant computational theories, only that of Grosz and Sidner provides an explicit treatment of intentionality. Mechanisms for Handling Key Linguistic Phenomena: Of the predominant theories, only RST fails to address the issues of discourse focus, reference resolution and cue phrases. Existing treatments of focus, however, suffer from terminological confusion between notions of focus, theme and topic, ..