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Functional Centering – Grounding Referential Coherence on Information Structure

Summary

The centering model explains local discourse coherence by ranking the entities of each utterance in a forward-looking center list (Cf). Most work orders this list by grammatical role (subject > object > others). Strube and Hahn argue that this fails for free-word-order languages such as German. They propose "functional centering," which ranks entities by information status instead. Entities already known to the hearer (hearer-old) outrank newly introduced ones (hearer-new).

The authors apply this single ordering to three kinds of intersentential anaphora: pronominal, nominal, and functional (bridging) anaphora. They test it on German and English texts from several domains and genres in two evaluation studies:

  • The first compares pronoun-resolution success of a grammatical-role-based centering algorithm against the functional variant.
  • The second introduces a cost-based evaluation that scores adjacent pairs of centering transitions as cheap or expensive inferentially, following the model's cognitive-load assumptions.

The work matters for two reasons. It makes Cf ranking potentially language-independent across fixed- and free-word-order languages, and it gives bridging references an explicit place inside the centering mechanism.

Key points

  • The paper replaces grammatical-role criteria for Cf ordering with information-structure criteria. These build on Prince's (1981, 1992) hearer-old vs. hearer-new distinction.
  • One ordering scheme covers pronominal, nominal, and functional anaphora. The running German example is a notebook "316LT," later referred to as Rechner and linked by inference to Akkus.
  • Evaluation 1 compares pronoun-resolution success rates of grammatical vs. functional centering algorithms on German and English data.
  • Evaluation 2 proposes a cost-based metric over transition pairs rather than isolated transitions. Under this metric, a transition type that looks poor alone can count as cheap in the right context.
  • This is the extended journal version of Strube & Hahn's ACL 1996 paper, incorporating material from Strube's 1996 doctoral thesis. Open issues listed include plural, generic, propositional, and deictic anaphora, complex NPs, and the lack of computational evaluation tools.

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: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Coreference resolution

Cited by

42 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 9 of them have a page here, 33 not yet.

Cite

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

@misc{strube1999functional,
  title = {{Functional Centering – Grounding Referential Coherence on Information Structure}},
  author = {Strube, Michael and Hahn, Udo},
  year = {1999},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J99-3001/}
}

References

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