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Centering: A Parametric Theory and Its Instantiations

Paper · 2004 · Massimo Poesio, Rosemary Stevenson, Barbara Di Eugenio et al.

Summary

Centering theory is a leading account of local coherence and salience in discourse. Its core notions, such as utterance, realization and ranking, are left underspecified, so the theory can be instantiated in many different ways. Poesio and colleagues treat these notions as explicit parameters and test, systematically and on a single shared dataset, how different settings affect the theory's claims. They first clarify what the central claims are, arguing that Constraint 1 (each utterance has a unique CB) is a core tenet. They also identify parameters the literature had overlooked. They then annotate English texts from several genres with reliable methods and count how often Rule 1, Rule 2 and Constraint 1 are broken under many configurations, including mixed proposals from different authors. Rule 1 holds robustly across settings. Constraint 1 depends heavily on the configuration. Settings that improve coherence tend to worsen salience predictions, and the reverse is also true. The authors conclude that entity-based coherence needs to be complemented by relational coherence. The work offers a neutral benchmark for anyone applying centering in NLP.

Key points

  • Rule 1, the preference to pronominalize the backward-looking center (CB), is confirmed under most parameter settings.
  • Constraint 1 fails under the mainstream "vanilla instantiation". It holds only when indirect realization is permitted, and even then 20–25% of utterances violate it.
  • There is a trade-off: settings that minimize violations of Constraint 1 and Rule 2 increase violations of Rule 1, and vice versa.
  • The definition of "pronoun" in Rule 1 is treated as a parameter. The comparison also covers "crossing" instantiations that combine proposals from different researchers.
  • The released resources are an annotation manual, a technical report, and a companion website (cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/poesio/cbc/) for testing further instantiations.

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 Illinois ChicagoChicago · United States38 works · 19,844 citations🎓University of EssexColchester · United Kingdom25 works · 3,285 citations🏢MitreBedford · United States5 works · 2,347 citations🎓Durham UniversityDurham · United Kingdom6 works · 536 citations

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPhilosophy · 211 works

Cite

Cite as Massimo Poesio, Rosemary Stevenson, Barbara Di Eugenio and Janet Hitzeman. 2004. Centering: A Parametric Theory and Its Instantiations. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1162/0891201041850911

@article{poesio2004centering,
  title = {{Centering: A Parametric Theory and Its Instantiations}},
  author = {Massimo Poesio, Rosemary Stevenson, Barbara {Di Eugenio} and Janet Hitzeman},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2004},
  doi = {10.1162/0891201041850911},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/0891201041850911}
}

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