Influences on Attribute Selection in Redescriptions: A Corpus Study
Pamela Jordan · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2000
We report on the results of the first stage of a corpus analysis that tests five hypotheses about how domain and discourse goals and the functions of repetition can influence the content of redescriptions in dialogue. We found a positive correlation between the attributes expressed in redescriptions and contexts in which three of these types of goals are predicted. These results provide us with guidance on the selection strategies we will test in the next stage of analysis. Introduction In an extended discourse, speakers often redescribe objects that were introduced earlier in order to say something more about the object or the event in which it participates. The main goal when redescribing an entity is to re-evoke the appropriate discourse entity. However, a goal-directed view of sentence generation suggests that speakers can attempt to satisfy multiple goals with each utterance [Appelt, 1985] and that a single linguistic form can opportunistically contribute to the satisfac...