Dialogue and Discourse

analysis
(some slides borrowed from
D. Jurafski and from S.
Ponzetto)

Natural Language Processing:

levels of representation
Pragmatics

Semantics

Synta
x
Words
Morphology

D&
D
QA
I
E
I
R

Processing flow of D&D Processing

Sound
waves

ASR

Syntacti
Words
c
processi
ng

Discours
Semanti
Parses
Meaning e/Dialog
c
ue
processi
processi
ng
ng
Meaning
in context

Discourse/dialogue analysis
So far we always analyzed one
sentence in isolation, syntactically
and/or semantically
Natural languages are spoken or
written as a collection of sentences
In general, a sentence or utterance
cannot be understood in isolation.

A dialog example
Xu and Rudnicky (2000)

A discourse example
John went to the bank to deposit his
paycheck.
He then took a train to Bills car
dealership.
He needed to buy a car.
The company he works for now isnt
near any public transportation.
He also wanted to talk to Bill about
their softball league.

Issues in discourse/dialogue
Dialogue
Turn-taking
Speech act
Grounding
Dialogue management

Discourse
Segmentation, coherence relations

Both
Anaphora
Co-reference

1. Turn-taking
Dialogue is characterized by
turn-taking.
A:
B:
A:
B:

Resource allocation problem:

How do speakers know when to take the

floor?

Turn-taking rules
Sacks et al. (1974)

At each transition-relevance place of

each turn:
a. If during this turn the current speaker
has selected B as the next speaker then
B must speak next.
b. If the current speaker does not select
the next speaker, any other speaker
may take the next turn.
c. If no one else takes the next turn, the
current speaker may take the next turn.

BASICALLY, TURN-TAKING REQUIRES TO DEFIN

A PROTOCOL

Issues in discourse/dialogue
Dialogue
Turn-taking
Speech act
Grounding
Dialogue management

Discourse
Segmentation, coherence relations

Both
Anaphora
Co-reference

2. Speech Acts
Speakers contribute more information
than just what is said
Speech Acts can give a principled
account of additional meaning
Speech Act Theory can also help us
examine utterances from the
perspective of their function, rather
than their form

Classification of SA according to
force
Locutionary Force (what is said)
Bring the chair to the dining room
Illocutionary Force (what is done)
The robot is asked to grasp a chair and
change his current position
Perlocutionary Force (the effect)
The current position of the robot&chair
changes to dining room (if action is
successfully performed)

The 3 levels of act revisited

Locutionary
Force

Illocutionary
Force

Perlocutionary
Force

Can I have the rest

of your sandwich?
Or
Are you going to
finish that?

Interrogative

Stop eating the

sandwich

Effect: You give me

sandwich (or you
are amused by my
quoting from
Diner) (or etc)

I want the rest of

your sandwich

Declarative

Stop eating the

sandwich

Effect: as above

Give me your
sandwich!

Directive

Stop eating the

sandwich

Effect: as above.

Types of Speech acts (more finegrained)

Commissives (Affect Speaker, Subjective)
TYPES: Oath, Offer, Promise
I promise you a new book

Declaratives (Change the Macrocosmic Social World)

TYPES: Baptism, Marriage
I will spend my vacations in Sardinia

Directives (Change the Microcosmic Social World)

TYPES: Command, Request
Move the chair near the table

Expressives (Feelings of Speaker)

TYPES: Apology, Thanks
Sorry, I did not understood correctly

(Mey 120, Searle 1977, 34)

Types of Speech acts (more finegrained)

Interrogatives (Hearer Knows Best)
TYPES: Closed (yes-no questions, list), Open (who?
when?..)
Do you see the coffe maker somewhere in the kitchen?

Imperatives (Directives) (Affect Hearer)

TYPES: Request, Requirement, Threat, Warning
Go to the dining room

Performatives (Affect world)

TYPES: Agreement, Appointment, Baptism, Declaration
of Independence, Dedication, Marriage
You are right!

Representatives (Objective Descriptive Statements)

TYPES: Statement that is either True or False
The coffee maker is on the table

Use of speech acts in dialogue:

speech-act frames

(Frost et al. 2010)

Go to the corner office by

the lobby,

Issues in discourse/dialogue
Dialogue
Turn-taking
Speech act
Grounding
Dialogue management

Discourse
Segmentation, coherence relations

Both
Anaphora
Co-reference

3. Grounding
Why do elevator buttons light up?
Clark (1996) (after Norman 1988)
Principle of closure. Agents
performing an action require
evidence, sufficient for current
purposes, that they have
succeeded in performing it
What is the linguistic correlate of
this?

Grounding
Need to know whether an action
succeeded or failed
Dialogue is also an action
a collective action performed by speaker and
hearer
Common ground: set of things mutually
believed by both speaker and hearer

Need to achieve common ground, so

hearer must ground or acknowledge
speakers utterance.

How do speakers ground?

Clark and Schaefer
Continued attention:
B continues attending to A

Relevant next contribution:

B starts in on next relevant contribution

Acknowledgement:
B nods or says continuer like uh-huh, yeah, assessment
(great!)

Demonstration:
B demonstrates understanding A by paraphrasing or
reformulating As contribution, or by collaboratively
completing As utterance

Display:
B displays verbatim all or part of As presentation

A human-human
conversation

Grounding examples
Display:
C: I need to travel in May
A: And, what day in May did you want to
travel?

Acknowledgement
C: He wants to fly from Boston
A: mm-hmm
C: to Baltimore Washington International
[Mm-hmm (usually transcribed uh-huh) is
a backchannel, continuer, or

Grounding Examples (2)

Acknowledgement + next relevant
contribution
And, what day in May did you want to
travel?
And youre flying into what city?
And what time would you like to leave?

The and indicates to the client that

agent has successfully understood
answer to the last question.

Grounding negative
responses
From Cohen et al. (2004)

System: Did you want to review some

more of your personal profile?
Caller: No.
Good!
System: Okay, whats next?
System: Did you want to review some
more of your personal profile?
Caller: No.
Bad!
System: Whats next?

Grounding and Dialogue

Systems
Grounding is not just a tidbit about
humans
Is key to design of
conversational agent
Why?
HCI researchers find users of speechbased interfaces are confused when
system doesnt give them an explicit
acknowledgement signal
Stifelman et al. (1993), Yankelovich et al.

Example

Issues in discourse/dialogue
Dialogue
Turn-taking
Speech act
Grounding
Dialogue management

Discourse
Segmentation, coherence relations

Both
Anaphora
Co-reference

Dialogue management
A dialogue system is finalized to some purpose (e.g.
a flight reservation)
Unlike for discourse analysis, a structure must be
determined a-priori to guide the conversation
Dialogue manager: forces the dialogue between
user and system to follow one or more structures
For speech dialogue systems, most common
approaches are:
Finite state dialogue manager
Frame and slot semantics
Agent-based dialogue manager

Finite-state dialogue
managers
System completely controls the
conversation with the user.
It asks the user a series of questions
Ignoring (or misinterpreting)
anything the user says that is not a
direct answer to the systems
questions

Finite State Dialogue

Manager

System forces the user to follow the

structure

Finite-state approach
Pros
simple to write
very robust and quick

Cons
System direct entire conversation
User actions very limited

Frame-based Approach

Frame-based system
Asks the user questions to fill slots in a template in order to
perform a task (form-filling task)
Permits the user to respond more flexibly to the systems
prompts (see Example 2)
Recognizes the main concepts in the users utterance

Example 1)
System: What is your destination?
User: London.
System: What day do you want to
travel?
User: Friday
33

Example 2)
System: What is your destination?
User: London on Friday around
10 in the morning.
System: I have the following
connection

Frame/Slot semantics
Show me morning flights from Boston to SF
on Tuesday.
SHOW:
FLIGHTS:
ORIGIN:
CITY: Boston
DATE: Tuesday
TIME: morning
DEST:
CITY: SanFrancisco

Frame/slot Semantics (multiple

sentences)

Slot

Question

IDENTIFY
What is your name?
ORIGIN
What city are you leaving from?
DEST
Where are you going?
DEPT DATE
What day would you like to leave?
DEPT TIMEWhat time would you like to leave?
AIRLINE
What is your preferred airline?

se the structure of the frame itself to guide dialogue

Frame-based approaches
Advantages
The ability to use natural language, multiple
slot filling
The system processes the users overinformative answers and corrections

Disadvantages
Appropriate for well-defined tasks in which the
system takes the initiative in the dialog
Difficult to predict which rule is likely to fire in
a particular context
36

Agent-based approaches
Properties

Complex communication using unrestricted natural language

Mixed-Initiative
Co-operative problem solving
Theorem proving, planning, distributed architectures
Conversational agents

Examples
User : Im looking for a job in the Calais area. Are there any servers?
System : No, there arent any employment servers for Calais. However, there is
an employment server for Pasde-Calais and an employment server for Lille.
Are you interested in one of these?

37

System attempts to provide a more co-operative response that might address the
users needs.

Agent-based Approach

Advantages
Suitable to more complex dialogues
Mixed-initiative dialogues

Disadvantages
Much more complex resources and
processing
Sophisticated natural language capabilities
Complicated communication between
dialogue modules
38

CMU-systems (Olympus)

Issues in discourse/dialogue
Dialogue
Turn-taking
Speech act
Grounding
Dialogue management

Discourse
Segmentation
coherence relations

Both
Anaphora
Co-reference

Discourse segmentation
Separating a document into a linear
sequence of subtopics
For example: scientific articles are segmented
into Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results,
Conclusions
Note: this is a simplification a discourse
might have a more complex structure

Applications:
Summarization: summarize each segment
separately
Information Retrieval / Information Extraction:
Apply to an appropriate, i.e. relevant segment

Discourse segmentation
Example: 21 paragraph article called
Stargazers

Source: Hearst (1997)

Unsupervised Discourse
Segmentation
Unsupervised = uses no training
data
Typically cohesion-based: segment
text into subtopics in which
sentences/paragraphs are cohesive
with each other
Cohesion: use of linguistic devices
to establish links between textual
units
Lexical Cohesion: use of same or
similar (e.g. hypernyms, hyponyms,

Textiling (Hearst, 1997)

An unsupervised, cohesion based
algorithm
compare adjacent blocks of text
look for shifts in vocabulary

Three main steps

Tokenization
Lexical score determination
Boundary identification

Textiling (Hearst, 1997)

term frequency

sentence numbers

TextTiling: Pre-processing
Convert text stream into terms (words)
Remove stop-words

E.g. the, a, of

Reduce each word to its root form (inflectional

morphology)
Nouns: singular to plural (sports -> sport)
Verbs: inflected to base form (coming -> come)

Divide text into token sequences (pseudosentences) of equal length (say 20 words)

TextTiling: Pre-processing
Convert text stream into terms (words)
Remove stop-words

E.g. the, a, of

Reduce each word to its root form (inflectional

morphology)
Nouns: singular to plural (sports -> sport)
Verbs: inflected to base form (coming -> come)

Divide text into token sequences (pseudosentences) of equal length (say 20 words)

s
Compute lexical cohesion score at
c
each gap
o
rSimilarity of the blocks before and after
ethe gap
Each block is made of k pseudosentences
dCosine similarity between the blocks
eword vectors

Gap

s
Compute lexical cohesion score at
c
each gap
o
rSimilarity of the blocks before and after
ethe gap
Each block is made of k pseudosentences
dCosine similarity between the blocks
Similarity
eword vectors

Gap

TextTiling: Boundary
identification
Compute the depth scores of each
gap
Distance from the peaks on both sides:
(a-b)+(c-b)

Assign segmentation if the depth

scorevalley
is larger than a boundary cutoff
c
(e.g. aavg-sd)
b

TextTiling: Boundary
identification
Compute the depth scores of each
gap
Distance from the peaks on both sides:
(a-b)+(c-b)

Assign segmentation if the depth

score is larger than a boundary cutoff
(e.g. avg-sd)

Source: Hearst (1994)

Textiling (Hearst, 1997)

Supervised Discourse Segmentation

Supervised = uses training
labeled data
Easy to get labeled data for some
segmentation tasks
Paragraph segmentation: use <p> tags from
Web docs

Model as a (binary) classification task

Classify if the sentence boundary is a
paragraph boundary

Supervised Discourse Segmentation

Features:

Use cohesion features: word overlap, word cosine

similarity, etc.
Additional features: discourse markers or cue word

Discourse marker or cue word: a word or phrase

that signal discourse structure

good evening, joining us now in at the beginning of

broadcast news; coming up next at the end of a
segment,
Tend to be domain-specific company Incorporated at
the beginning of a segment (WSJ)

Either hand-code or automatically determine by

feature selection

Issues in discourse/dialogue
Dialogue
Turn-taking
Speech act
Grounding
Dialogue management

Discourse
Segmentation
coherence relations

Both
Anaphora
Co-reference

Text Coherence
A collection of independent sentences do
not make a discourse because they lack
coherence
Meaning relation between two units of text
how the meaning of different units of text
combine to build
meaning of the larger unit
Explanation
John hid Bills car keys.
He was drunk.
???
John hid Bills car keys. He likes spinach.

Coherence Relations
Other relations (Hobbs, 1979):
Result

The Tin Woodman was caught in the rain. His joints rusted.
Parallel

The scarecrow wanted some brains. The Tin Woodman wanted a

heart.
Elaboration

Dorothy was from Kansas. She lived in the midst of the great
Kansas prairies. Occasion
Dorothy picked up the oil-can. She oiled the Tin Woodmans
joints.

Discourse Structure
The hierarchical structure of a
discourse according to the
coherence relations
Analogous to syntactic tree structure
A node in a tree represents locally
coherent sentences: discourse
segment

Discourse Structure: example

S1: John went to the bank to deposit
his paycheck.
S2: He then took a train to Bills car
dealership.
S3: He needed to buy a car.
S4: The company he works for now
isnt near any public transportation.
S5: He also wanted to talk to Bill about
their softball league.

Discourse Structure: example

Discourse Structure: example

Source: Marcu (2000a)

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)

(Mann, Matthiessen, and Thompson 89)

One theory of discourse structure,

based on identifying relations
between parts of the text
Identify clauses and clause-like units
that are unequivocally the nucleus or
satellite of a rhetorical relation
Nucleus/satellite notion encodes
asymmetry

Discourse Parsing
Coherence Relation Assignment:
determine automatically the coherence
relations between units of a discourse
Discourse Parsing: find automatically
the discourse structure of an entire
discourse
Example of approaches:
Unsupervised based on cue phrases (or
discourse markers)
Supervised, based on discourse treebanks cf.
the Penn Discourse Treebank
(http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~pdtb)

Automatic Coherence
Assignment
Shallow cue-phrase-based algorithm:
1. Identify cue phrases in a text
2. Segment text into discourse segments
using cue phrases
3. Assign coherence relations between
consecutive discourse segments

Automatic coherence assignment

Step 1: identification of cue phrases that signal
coherence relations
Discourse connectives: because, although,
example, with, and

Connectives are ambiguous

With its distant orbit, Mars exhibits frigid weather

conditions
We can see Mars with an ordinary telescope

Use some simple heuristics, e.g. capitalization of

with, etc. or more complex disambiguation
techniques

Automatic coherence assignment

Step 2: segment the text into discourse
segments
Typically, sentences may suffice BUT
clauses are often
more appropriate
Explanation
(Sporleder and Lapata, 2004)
With its distant orbit, Mars exhibits frigid
weather conditions

Step 3: apply rules based on the connectives

Example: a sentence beginning with because
indicates Explanation relation with the next

Identifying RS Automatically
(Marcu 1999)
A supervised parser trained on a discourse
treebank

90 rhetorical structure trees, hand-annotated

for rhetorical relations (RRs)
Elementary discourse units (EDUs) linked by
RRs
Parser learns to identify Nucleus, Satellite and
their RR
Features: Wordnet-based similarity, lexical,
structural

Uses discourse segmenter to identify

discourse units

Trained to segment on hand-labeled corpus

(C4.5)

Issues in discourse/dialogue
Dialogue
Turn-taking
Speech act
Grounding
Dialogue management

Discourse
Segmentation, coherence relations

Both
Anaphora
Co-reference

Task definition
IDENTIFYING WHICH
MENTIONS REFER TO
THE SAME
(DISCOURSE) ENTITY

Chains of mentions in text

(COREFERENCE CHAIN)
Toni Johnson pulls a tape measure across the front of what was
once a stately Victorian home.
A deep trench now runs along its north wall, exposed when
the house lurched two feet off its foundation during last
week's earthquake.
Once inside, she spends nearly four hours measuring and
diagramming each room in the 80-year-old house, gathering
enough information to estimate what it would cost to rebuild
it.
While she works inside, a tenant returns with several friends
to collect furniture and clothing.
One of the friends sweeps broken dishes and shattered glass
from a countertop and starts to pack what can be salvaged
(WSJ section of Penn Treebank
from the kitchen.
corpus)

Anaphora Coreference
COREFERENT, not ANAPHORIC
two mentions of same object in different
documents
Obama was interviewed last night. The
President..

ANAPHORIC, not COREFERENT

identity of sense: John bought a shirt, and Bill
got ONE, too

Nominal anaphoric
expressions
REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS:
John bought himself an hamburger

PRONOUNS:
Definite pronouns: Ross bought {a radiometer | three
kilograms of after-dinner mints} and gave {it | them} to
Nadia for her birthday. (Hirst, 1981)
Indefinite pronouns: Sally admired Sues jacket, so she
got one for Christmas. (Garnham, 2001)

DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS:
A man and a woman came into the room. The man sat
down.
Epiteths: A man ran into my car. The idiot wasnt looking
where he was going.

DEMONSTRATIVES:
Tom has been caught shoplifting. That boy will turn out

Non-nominal anaphoric expressions

PRO-VERBS:
Daryel thinks like I do.

GAPPING:
Nadia brought the food for the picnic, and Daryel _
the wine.

TEMPORAL REFERENCES:
In the mid-Sixties, free love was rampant across
campus. It was then that Sue turned to Scientology.
(Hirst, 1981)

LOCATIVE REFERENCES:
The Church of Scientology met in a secret room
behind the local Colonel Sanders chicken stand.
Sue had her first dianetic experience there. (Hirst,

Types of anaphoric relations

Identity of REFERENCE

Ross bought {a radiometer | three kilograms of afterdinner mints} and gave {it | them} to Nadia for her
birthday.

Identity of SENSE

Sally admired Sues jacket, so she got one for

Christmas. (Garnham, 2001)
(PAYCHECK PRONOUNS): The man who gave his
paycheck to his wife is wiser than the man who gave it
to his mistress. (Karttunen, 1976?)

BOUND anaphora

No Italian believes that World Cup referees treated his

team fairly

ASSOCIATIVE / indirect anaphoric relations

(bridging)
The house . the kitchen

Associative anaphora
(a type of BRIDGING)
Toni Johnson pulls a tape measure across the front of what was
once a stately Victorian home.
A deep trench now runs along its north wall, exposed when the
house lurched two feet off its foundation during last week's
earthquake.
Once inside, she spends nearly four hours measuring and
diagramming each room in the 80-year-old house, gathering
enough information to estimate what it would cost to rebuild it.
While she works inside, a tenant returns with several friends to
collect furniture and clothing.
One of the friends sweeps broken dishes and shattered glass
from a countertop and starts to pack what can be salvaged
from the kitchen.
(WSJ section of Penn Treebank
corpus)

Not all anaphoric expressions

always anaphoric
Expletives
It is half past two.
There is an engine at Avon

First mention definites

References to visual situation
(exophora)
pick that up and put it over there.

Interpreting anaphoric
expressions

Interpreting (resolving) an anaphoric

expressions involves at least three
aspects:
1.

2.

3.

Deciding whether the expression is in fact

anaphoric
Identifying its antecedent (possibly not
introduced by a nominal)
Determining its meaning (cfr. identity of
sense vs. identity of reference)

(not necessarily taken in this order!)

Factors that affect the interpretation

of anaphoric expressions
Factors:
Morphological features (agreement)
Syntactic information (Binding)
Salience
Lexical and commonsense knowledge

Distinction often made between

CONSTRAINTS (must, e.g. agreement
in gender as: John...he , the book...it)
and PREFERENCES

Supervised learning for coreference

resolution
Classification
Train a classifier to determine whether
two mentions are coreferent or not
coreferent
coref ?

coref ?

[Israel] will ask the US to [the Jewish state] [Iraqi], ...

not
coref ?

Supervised learning for coreference

resolution
Clustering pairwise coreference
Iraq
decisions
coref

[Israel],
not
coref

will ask the US

[the Jewish state]
[Iraqi]
...

Iraq
Iraqi

not coref

Israel

Clustering
Algorithm

Israel
the Jewish
state
its
A jittery
publicUSA
US
United States

Soon et al. (2001): Features

Features Used
Number Agreement Feature: are i and j both singular or
both plural
Semantic Class Agreement Feature: true if the sem class
of i and j are the same or if one is the parent of the
other; false or unknown otherwise
Gender Agreement Feature: are i and j of the same
gender, based on designator (Mr.) or pronoun
Both-Proper-Names Feature: true if i and j are proper
names
Alias Feature: true if i is an alias of j or vice versa
Appositive Feature: true if i or j is a proper name and i
and j are separated by a comma and no verb

Soon et al. (2001): semantic class

agreement

PERSON

FEMALE

OBJECT

MALE

ORGANIZATION LOCATION
TIME

MONEY

SEMCLASS = true iff semclass(i) <= semclass(j) or

viceversa

DATE
PERCENT

Soon et al. (2001): Features

Example

<Israel, the Jewish

state>

Lexical and commonsense

knowledge
Nominals the most common type of
anaphoric expression
Main source of errors with nominals:
lack of commonsense knowledge
Semantics has been pointed out as being
relevant since seminal work:
Cf. e.g. Charniak (1973); Hobbs (1978)

Lexical and commonsense

knowledge: examples
Which kind of semantics is useful for
coreference resolution?
synonymy relations
i.e. different expressions used to refer to
the same concept

Synonymy relations and coreference

resolution
Toni Johnson pulls a tape measure across the front of
what was once [a stately Victorian home].
..
The remainder of [the house] leans precariously
against a sturdy oak tree.
to merge their U.S. satellite TV operations with
Primestar Partners, [the nation]s largest satellite TV
company, sources familiar with the inquiry say. [. . . ]
The slot is highly valuable because it is one of only
three available in [this country] from which a satellite
can beam TV programs across most of North America
simultaneously.

Lexical and commonsense

knowledge: examples
Which kind of semantics is useful for
coreference resolution?
instance-of relations
i.e. that an individual belongs to a
certain class (e.g. Obama is an istance
of U.S. President, Fido is an instance of
dog, Italy is an istance of Nation)

Instantiation relations and

coreference resolution
[The FCC] took [three specific
actions] regarding [AT&T]. By a 4-0
vote, it allowed AT&T to continue
offering special discount packages to
big customers, called Tariff 12,
rejecting appeals by AT&T
competitors that the discounts were
illegal. ..
..
[The agency] said that because MCI's
offer had expired AT&T couldn't

Lexical and commonsense

knowledge: examples
Which kind of semantics is useful for
coreference resolution?
isa relations
i.e. subsumption between concepts (cat
is-a feline, car is-a vehicle)

Subsumption relations and

coreference resolution
[Petrie Stores Corporation, Secaucus NJ] said an
uncertain economy and faltering sales probably
will result in a second quarter loss and perhaps
a deficit for the first six months of fiscal 1994
[The womens apparel specialty retailer] said
sales at stores open more than one year, a key
barometer of a retain concern strength, declined
2.5% in May, June and the first week of July.
[The company] operates 1714 stores.
In the first six months of fiscal 1993, [the
company] had net income of $1.5 million .

Lexical and commonsense

knowledge: examples
Which kind of semantics is useful for
coreference resolution?
alias relations
i.e. abbreviation-like information for
individuals
(UNO = United nations organization)

Alias relations and coreference

resolution
A new report reveals more
problems at [the Internal
Revenue Service]. A broad
review of [the agency] found it
used improper tactics in
evaluating [IRS] employees at
many [IRS] offices across the
Includes also more complex
country.
examples:

GOP and the Republican Party

Lexical and commonsense

knowledge: examples
Which kind of semantics is useful for
coreference resolution?
meronymical relations
i.e. part-of relations between concepts
(arm, body; wheels, car; kitchen,house)

Meronymical relations and

coreference resolution
Once inside, she spends nearly four
hours measuring and diagramming each
room in [the 80-year-old house],
gathering enough information to
estimate what it would cost to rebuild it.
While she works inside, a tenant returns
with several friends to collect furniture
and clothing. One of the friends sweeps
broken dishes and shattered glass from a
countertop and starts to pack what can
be salvaged from [the kitchen].

Early work: the semantic network

assumption (Charniak, Sidner)
VEHICLE
ISA

WHEELS

HAS

CAR

I saw [a car] come in.

THE VEHICLE was moving very
slowly
THE WHEELS were moving very
slowly

Lexical and commonsense

knowledge sources
Using semantic networks, e.g. WordNet:
Poesio & Vieira (1998); Harabagiu et al. (2001)

Extracting knowledge from corpora

Poesio et al. (2002); Kehler (2004); Yang et al.
(2005); Markert & Nissim (2005); Versley
(2007)

Extracting knowledge from resources such

as lexica and encyclopedias, e.g. from
Wikipedia
Ponzetto & Strube (2006; 2007)

Conclusion of NLP course

Basic tasks: POS tagging, chunking, parsing, semantic
analysis
TOOLS/RESOURCES/METHODS: Many available
algorithms on-line, many linguistic resources (WordNet,
Framenet, Dbpedia..) + Machine learning algorithms
(weka)
Complex tasks: entailment, anaphora resolution,
structural analysis
Applications: Information Extraction, Question
Answering, Text Classification (including opinion
mining), Dialogue, Summarization, Profiling, Information
filtering, Image Classification, Language
Generation..NATURAL LANGUAGE IS PERVASIVE

THE END