Analyzing Explicitly-Structured Discourse in a Limited Domain: Trouble and Failure Reports

Abstract

Recent theories of focusing and reference rely crucially on discourse structure to constrain the availability of discourse entities for reference, but deriving the structure of an arbitrary discourse has proved to be a significant problem. A useful level of problem reduction may be achieved by analyzing discourse in which the structure is explicit, rather than implicit. In this paper we consider a genre of explicitly-structured discourse: the Trouble and Failure Report (TFR), whose structure is both explicit and constant across discourses. We present the results of an analysis of a corpus of 331 TFRs, with particular attention to discourse segmentation and focusing. We then describe how the Trouble and Failure Report was automated in a prototype data collection and information retrieval application, using the PUNDIT natural-language processing system.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1989
Accession Number
ADA458705

Entities

People

  • Catherine N. Ball

Organizations

  • Unisys

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Ground and Sea Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Intelligence Software
  • Availability
  • Boundaries
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Computer Vision
  • Data Processing
  • Databases
  • Information Retrieval
  • Information Systems
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Language Understanding
  • Natural Languages
  • Relational Databases

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Bayesian Inference
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation