A Preliminary Model of Centering in Dialog

The centering framework explains local discourse coherence by relating a speaker's focus of attention and the forms of referring expressions. Although this framework has proven useful in single-speaker discourse, its utility for multi-party discourse has not been shown. It is unclear how to adapt it to handle discourse phenomena such as turn-taking, acknowledgments, first and second person pronouns, and disfluencies. This paper reports our experiments applying three naive models of centering theory for dialog. These results will be used as a baseline for future, more sophisticated models