Development and Implementation of a Discourse Model for Newspaper Texts

Empirical Methods in Discourse: Interpretation and Generation

Volume

Papers from the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

In this paper, we will focus on the development, implementation, and evolution of a discourse model which is used to computationally instantiate a discourse structure in individual texts. This discourse model was developed for use in a Text Structuring module that recognizes discourse-level structure within a large-scale information retrieval system, DR-link (Liddy Myaeng, 1993). The Text Structurer produces an enriched representation of each document by computationally decomposing it into smaller, conceptually labelled components. This delineation of the discourse-level organization of each document’s contents facilitates retrieval of those documents which convey the appropriate discourse semantics that are responsive to the user’s query.