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Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse

Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text, in our own words: the license "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" does not allow redistributing the text itself. Original — aclanthology.org/J86-3001.pdf

Summary

Grosz and Sidner propose a computational account of how discourse is organized. It asks what makes a sequence of utterances one coherent discourse, and which earlier parts a new utterance must connect to. They argue that discourse structure has three interacting layers. The linguistic structure groups utterances into segments, which can be embedded within each other. The intentional structure records the purpose behind each segment and how these purposes relate. The attentional state is a changing record of which entities, properties and relations are currently salient. The work combines Grosz's earlier research on focusing in task-oriented dialogue with research on recognizing intentions. It extends the idea of a "task" to mental and linguistic goals as well as physical ones. Two sample discourses illustrate the framework: a written text and a task-oriented dialogue. The paper uses the three-way separation to explain cue phrases, referring expressions and interruptions. The authors claim this gives simpler explanations and simpler processing mechanisms than earlier models that merge the layers. The result is an influential foundation for discourse processing in NLP.

Key points

  • The three components are the linguistic structure, the intentional structure and the attentional state. The authors treat separating them as essential for handling interruptions, cue phrases and reference.
  • Segments are not strictly decompositional. A segment can contain both embedded subsegments and utterances of its own.
  • The paper cites evidence that segmentation is real:
    • Chafe (1979, 1980) found pause-length differences at segment boundaries.
    • Butterworth (1975) found that speech is slower at the start of a segment.
    • Mann's subjects segmented dialogues in largely the same way.
  • The intentional structure relies on a few structural relations between purposes. The authors argue against choosing from fixed sets of rhetorical relations, as in Hobbs 1979, Mann and Thompson 1983 and Reichman 1981.
  • The paper introduces the role terms ICP (initiating conversational participant) and OCP (other conversational participant) to replace "speaker" and "hearer." It was published in Computational Linguistics 12(3), 1986, and it explicitly leaves discourse meaning out of scope.

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

Fields: Natural language processing

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cited by

343 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 13 of them have a page here, 330 not yet.

Cite

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

@article{grosz1986attention,
  title = {{Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse}},
  author = {Grosz, Barbara J. and Sidner, Candace L.},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1986},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J86-3001/}
}

References

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