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A Reformulation of Rule 2 of Centering Theory

Paper · 2001 · Rodger Kibble

Summary

Centering theory (CT) models local discourse coherence. Its Rule 2 ranks transitions in a fixed order: Continue, then Retain, then Smooth Shift, then Rough Shift. Kibble argues that this fixed ranking is poorly justified. Corpus studies do not support placing Retain above Smooth Shift, the ranking does not fit standard NLG pipelines, and it cannot explain why a Retain followed by a Shift is a natural way to bring in a new topic.

He breaks transitions into two separate tests. Cohesion asks whether the Cb stays the same, and salience asks whether the Cb is the most prominent NP. He adds a simplified form of Strube and Hahn's (1999) cheapness principle, under which the previous utterance's Cp should correctly anticipate the current Cb. The four classic transitions then become descriptive labels. Their relative preference is partial and depends on context, arising from how the three constraints interact.

The paper offers no new empirical data. Its value is a leaner, more principled Rule 2 that handles topic switches and fits text planning versus sentence planning in generation.

Key points

  • The proposed ordering puts cheapness or salience above cohesion. In segment-initial utterances, salience may be dropped if cheapness holds.
  • Corpus analyses by di Eugenio, Hurewitz and Passoneau all found more Smooth Shifts than Retains. In Passoneau's spoken data, Shifts even outnumbered Continues.
  • Strube and Hahn's version adds two transitions (Exp-Continue, Exp-Smooth Shift) and a table of 36 transition pairs. Kibble considers this needlessly complex and also weaker in its predictions.
  • In NLG terms, cohesion belongs to text planning and salience to sentence planning. Retain and Shift therefore result from choices made at different stages of generation.
  • Evaluating sequences like Continue–Retain–Smooth Shift requires looking across three utterances, so the speaker plans ahead to make things easier for the hearer.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of LondonLondon · United Kingdom12 works · 924 citations🎓Goldsmiths University of LondonLondon · United Kingdom4 works · 381 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksNeuroscience · 165 worksCognitive Neuroscience · 164 works

Cite

Cite as Rodger Kibble. 2001. A Reformulation of Rule 2 of Centering Theory. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{kibble2001reformulation,
  title = {{A Reformulation of Rule 2 of Centering Theory}},
  author = {Rodger Kibble},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2001},
  doi = {10.1162/089120101753342680},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/089120101753342680}
}

References

11 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Brennan, Susan E. 1998. Centering as a psychological resource for achieving joint reference in spontaneous discourse. In Marilyn Walker, Aravind K. Joshi, and Ellen Prince, editors, Centering Theory in Discourse. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pages 227-249. find
  2. Brennan, Susan E., Marilyn Walker Friedman, and Carl Pollard. 1987. A centering approach to pronouns. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 155-162. di Eugenio, Barbara. 1998. Centering in Italian. In Marilyn Walker and Aravind K.
  3. Joshi, and Ellen Prince, editors, Centering Theory in Discourse. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pages 115-137. find
  4. Grosz, Barbara J., Aravind K. Joshi, and Scott Weinstein. 1995. Centering: A framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 21(2):203-225.
  5. Hurewitz, Felicia. 1998. A quantitative look at discourse coherence. In Marilyn Walker, Aravind K. Joshi, and Ellen Prince, editors, Centering Theory in Discourse. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pages 273-291. find
  6. Kibble, Rodger J. 1999. Cb or not Cb? Centering theory applied to NLG. In Proceedings of ACL Workshop on the Relation of Discourse~Dialogue Structure and Reference, pages 72-81. find
  7. Kibble, Rodger J. and Richard D. J. Power. 2000. An integrated framework for text planning and pronominalisation. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pages 77-84. find
  8. Passoneau, Rebecca. 1998. Interaction of discourse structure with explicitness of discourse anaphoric noun phrases. In Marilyn Walker, Aravind K. Joshi, and Ellen Prince, editors, Centering Theory in Discourse. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pages 327-358. find
  9. Reiter, Ehud. 1994. Has a consensus NL generation architecture appeared, and is it psycholinguistically plausible? In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pages 163-170. find
  10. Strube, Michael and Udo Hahn. 1999. Functional centering: Grounding referential coherence in information structure. Computational Linguistics 25(3):309-344. van Deemter, Kees and Rodger Kibble. 2000. On coreferring: Coreference annotation in MUC and related schemes. Computational Linguistics 26(4):6…
  11. Walker, Marilyn, Aravind K. Joshi, and Ellen Prince. 1998. Centering in naturally occurring discourse: An overview. In Marilyn Walker, Aravind K. Joshi, and Ellen Prince, editors, Centering Theory in Discourse. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pages 1-28. find

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