Discourse Structure and Computation: Past, Present and Future
Bonnie Webber, Aravind K. Joshi · 2012
The discourse properties of text have long been recognized as critical to language technology, and over the past 40 years, our understanding of and ability to exploit the discourse properties of text has grown in many ways. This essay briefly recounts these developments, the technology they employ, the applications they support, and the new challenges that each subsequent development has raised. We conclude with the challenges faced by our current understanding of discourse, and the applications that meeting these challenges will promote. 1 Why bother with discourse?