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Toward a Synthesis of Two Accounts of Discourse Structure

Paper · 1996 · Megan Moser and Johanna D. Moore

Summary

Research on computational discourse models has long been divided into two camps. One relies on domain-independent rhetorical relations, led by RST (Mann and Thompson 1988). The other relies on speaker intentions, led by G&S (Grosz and Sidner 1986). This short theoretical article argues that the two camps agree far more than is usually assumed.

The authors introduce Intentional Linguistic Structure (ILS), a neutral term for discourse structure that follows from a speaker's goals. G&S describes ILS explicitly. RST captures it only indirectly, through nuclearity. The central claim is that an RST nucleus conveys an intention that dominates the intention behind its satellite, so RST nuclearity mirrors G&S dominance. To support this, the authors add the notion of a segment's "core," the part that states its purpose. They illustrate it with a short text urging someone to attend a ballet.

They then sketch a partial mapping between the frameworks and find that each theory's remaining claims are largely compatible. The correspondence also explains why informational and intentional structures can conflict. A merged account would help both language interpretation and generation.

Key points

  • The article is a squib in Computational Linguistics (1996) and contains no corpus or experiments.
  • The core correspondence is that an RST nucleus maps to a dominating G&S intention (In) and a satellite to a dominated one (Is).
  • In G&S, dominance fully fixes how segments embed, while satisfaction-precedence only constrains their order.
  • On the RST side, the authors focus on the most common of its five schema patterns: one nucleus, one satellite and one relation. Valid analyses form trees over minimal units, usually clauses.
  • The worked example nests three intentions, I0 → I1 → I2: attend the concert, the show will be entertaining, and it features all new choreography. Each segment has a single-utterance core.
  • One question remains disputed: whether RST's finer intentional relations, which would be subtypes of dominance in G&S, belong in a merged theory. The authors propose two ways to settle it:
    • empirically, by coding a corpus and checking whether linguistic cues correlate with those relations;
    • practically, by asking whether the distinctions help NLG or NLU systems.

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 PittsburghPittsburgh · United States65 works · 23,401 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPhilosophy · 287 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Discourse analysis · 471 works

Cite

Cite as Megan Moser and Johanna D. Moore. 1996. Toward a Synthesis of Two Accounts of Discourse Structure. Computational Linguistics.

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

@article{moser1996toward,
  title = {{Toward a Synthesis of Two Accounts of Discourse Structure}},
  author = {Megan Moser and Johanna D. Moore},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1996},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J96-3006/}
}

References

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

  1. Asher, Nicholas and Alex Lascarides. 1994. Intentions and information in discourse. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  2. Clark, H. H. and S. E. Haviland. 1977. Comprehension and the given-new contract. In R. O. Freedle, editor, Discourse Production and Comprehension. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ. find
  3. Grice, H. Paul. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 68:377-388. find
  4. Grosz, Barbara and Sarit Kraus. In press. Collaborative plans for complex group action. ArtiJicical Intelligence. find
  5. Grosz, Barbara J. and Candace L. Sidner. 1986. Attention, intention, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics 12(3):175-204. find
  6. Grosz, Barbara J. and Candace L. Sidner. 1990. Plans for discourse. In Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha E. Pollack, editor, Intentions in Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pages 417-444. find
  7. Hirschberg, Julia B., Diane J. Litman, Janet Pierrehumbert, and Gregory L. Ward. 1987. Intonation and the intentional structure of discourse. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intellligence, pages 636-639, Milan, Italy. find
  8. Hobbs, Jerry R. 1985. On the coherence and structure of discourse. Technical Report CSLI-85-37, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Leland Stanford Junior University, Stanford, California. find
  9. Hobbs, Jerry R. 1993. Intention, information, and structure in discourse: A first draft. In Burning Issues in Discourse, NATO Advanced Research Workshop, pages 41–66, Maratea, Italy. find
  10. Mann, William C. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1988. Rhetorical Structure Theory: Towards a functional theory of text organization. Text 8(3):243-281. find
  11. Moore, Johanna D. 1995. Participating in Explanatory Dialogues: Interpreting and Responding to Questions in Context. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. find
  12. Moore, Johanna D. In press. The role of plans in discourse generation. In Daniel Everett and Sarah G. Thomason, editors, Discourse: Linguistic, Computational, and Philosophical Perspectives. Moore, Johanna D. and C4cile L. Paris. 1993. Planning text for advisory dialogues: Capturing intentional and…
  13. Moore, Johanna D. and Martha E. Pollack. 1992. A problem for RST: The need for multi-level discourse analysis. Computational Linguistics 18(4):537-544.
  14. Moser, Megan and Johanna D. Moore. 1995. Investigating cue selection and placement in tutorial discourse. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 130-135. find
  15. Moser, Megan and Johanna D. Moore. In preparation. On the correlation of cue placement with discourse structure: results from a corpus study. find

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