Abstract
Discourse processing is a suite of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks to uncover linguistic structures from texts at several levels, which can support many downstream applications. This involves identifying the topic structure, the coherence structure, the coreference structure, and the conversation structure for conversational discourse. Taken together, these structures can inform text summarization, machine translation, essay scoring, sentiment analysis, information extraction, question answering, and thread recovery. The tutorial starts with an overview of basic concepts in discourse analysis – monologue vs. conversation, synchronous vs. asynchronous conversation, and key linguistic structures in discourse analysis. We also give an overview of linguistic structures and corresponding discourse analysis tasks that discourse researchers are generally interested in, as well as key applications on which these discourse structures have an impact.
Highlights
Discourse analysis has been a fundamental problem in the ACL community, where the focus is to develop tools to automatically model language phenomena that go beyond the individual sentences
We start with an overview of basic concepts in discourse analysis – monologue vs. conversation, synchronous vs. asynchronous conversation, and key linguistic structures in discourse analysis
We show applications of coherence models and discourse parsers
Summary
Discourse analysis has been a fundamental problem in the ACL community, where the focus is to develop tools to automatically model language phenomena that go beyond the individual sentences. With the advent of Internet technologies, new forms of discourse are emerging (e.g., emails and discussion forums) with novel set of challenges for the computational models. Most computational models for discourse analysis are going through a paradigm shift from traditional statistical models to deep neural models. Considering all these novel aspects at once, this tutorial is quite timely for the community, by providing the attendees with an up-to-date, critical overview of existing approaches and their evaluations, applications, and future challenges
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
