Processing Local Coherence of Discourse in Centering Theory
Jianhua Hu, Haihua Pan · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2001
In this paper we will investigate the centering theory proposed by Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein (1995) (henceforth GJW) and revised in Walker, Joshi, and Prince (1998) (henceforth WJP), and argue that their theory needs to be further extended and revised.We show that the centering theory proposed by GJW and WJP would make wrong predictions about the preferred transition states in discourse processing since their backward-looking center (Cb) is not primitive and thus cannot be used to adequately model the local coherence of discourse.We propose that Cb should be distinguished from the discourse segment topic (DST), and provide a more restrictive definition of Cb, which restricts Cb(U) to be the element in Cf(U 11 ) that is realized by the subject pronoun or the pronoun contained in the subject in U.