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Limited Attention and Discourse Structure

Paper · 1996 · Marilyn A. Walker

Summary

This squib asks how the limited capacity of human attention should be modeled in computational accounts of discourse, specifically for ellipsis, pronoun resolution, and inferring discourse relations. Walker challenges the view that accessibility follows hierarchical recency, as operationalized by Grosz and Sidner's stack model of attentional state. Using naturally occurring dialogues from a radio financial-advice talk show, she shows two problems for the stack model. First, slightly lengthening an embedded interruption makes a later elliptical continuation hard to interpret, even though the stack model predicts no change. Second, speakers repeat already shared content (informationally redundant utterances, IRUs) right after returning to a topic that should still be salient. She proposes the cache model: a small, fast working memory backed by a larger, slower long-term main memory. Items are retained, retrieved, or displaced according to speakers' intentions and expectations. The model treats accessibility as gradual and effort-dependent. It accounts for IRUs and infelicitous variants while staying consistent with psychological findings on limited working memory, and it yields experimentally testable predictions.

Key points

  • The paper contrasts linear recency (backward search through text) with hierarchical recency (adjacency in the discourse tree, i.e., the Grosz & Sidner stack). It argues that attention must be partly sensitive to linear recency.
  • The data are excerpts from a financial-advice radio corpus (Pollack, Hirschberg, and Webber 1982). Dialogue B, a constructed variant of Dialogue A, adds only two utterances to the interruption, yet this makes utterance 8a nearly uninterpretable.
  • In the cache model, the cache stands for working memory, with a capacity of roughly 2–3 sentences or about 7 propositions (Miller; Kintsch). Its operations are retention, retrieval, and storage, and a replacement policy that favors recently used items decides what is displaced.
  • All premises of an inference, and both segments in a discourse relation, must be in the cache at the same time. A pronoun's cospecifier must either already be in the cache or be retrieved into it.
  • Of 21 return pops collected from the literature, 11 have antecedents competing on gender and number. Adding selectional cues leaves 4 unresolved, and IRUs appear in 6 of the 21 returns. Combining IRUs and selectional restrictions leaves only 2 problematic cases.

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

🏢AT&TBedminster · United States40 works · 75,466 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

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Discourse analysis · 466 works

Cite

Cite as Marilyn A. Walker. 1996. Limited Attention and Discourse Structure. Computational Linguistics.

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

@article{walker1996limited,
  title = {{Limited Attention and Discourse Structure}},
  author = {Marilyn A. Walker},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1996},
  doi = {10.5555/230386.230391},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5555/230386.230391}
}

References

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

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