Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse

What it is about

The paper gives the definitive statement of centering, a model of the local attentional state inside one discourse segment. Each utterance has a ranked set of forward-looking centers (Cf), mostly ordered by grammatical role, and exactly one backward-looking center (Cb), which is the highest-ranked center of the previous utterance that the current one realizes. Two rules follow: if any center is a pronoun, the Cb must be a pronoun too (Rule 1), and transitions are preferred in the order continue, retain, shift (Rule 2). The paper is a theory, not an evaluation. Its examples (John and Mike, Susan and Betsy, the Vice-President) show that breaking Rule 1 or running many shifts lowers coherence and raises the hearer's inference load, and the authors say the rules had no psycholinguistic test yet (section 6).

Ideas

I2. Rule 1 as a warning, not a rule. When a pronoun points to a non-Cb entity while the Cb is a name, emit a flag in the explain output. Count how often the flag fires on correct links and on wrong ones. It is a precision check on the sieve, and it changes no link.
I3. Transition labels (continue, retain, shift) per paragraph as a coherence diagnostic in the world's tale readers. Negative control: the same paragraphs with shuffled sentence order must show more shifts. If they do not, the labels measure nothing.

For Mova

I1. Use the Cb as a tie-breaker in the coref sieve. Per sentence, rank the mentions by UD role (nsubj above obj above other) and prefer the previous sentence's Cb as the antecedent of a pronoun. Each link gets the reason "Cb continued", so explain shows it. Measure with the coref eval on GUM, two-fold cv, and two identical runs before any claim.
I4. Value-free and value-loaded readings of role nouns ("the Vice-President") in onto: a role concept and its current holder are separate nodes, and a pronoun links to one of them with a reason that says which. Write our own test sentences; do not copy the paper's examples.

The chapter is languages/en/35-reference-and-coreference.md. The code is coref/src/sieve.rs and coref/src/mention.rs, the tale readers in world, and the role nouns in onto. The measure is the coref eval on GUM; check that corpus's licence in licence/DATA.md before any release use. The paper is NC-SA: keep only these ideas in our words, and no text in the repo.

Institutions

🎓University of PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia ·

United States143 works · 56,645 citations 🎓Harvard UniversityCambridge ·

United States64 works · 35,670 citations

Topics Discourse analysis

Cite

Cite as Barbara J. Grosz, Aravind K. Joshi and Scott Weinstein. 1995. Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.21236/ada324949

@article{grosz1995centering,
  title = {{Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse}},
  author = {Barbara J. Grosz, Aravind K. Joshi and Scott Weinstein},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1995},
  doi = {10.21236/ada324949},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21236/ada324949}
}

References

2 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

Baldwin, Breck (1993). "Anaphora resolution with centering." In Workshop on Centering Theory in Naturally-Occurring Discourse. find
Philadelphia, PA, May 1993. find

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📄 Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse