Section 3 : Discourse understanding and grammar induction

Commentary

Section Goals

• To introduce the basic ideas of understanding natural language discourse and inducing grammar rules.

Learning Objectives

Learning Objective 1

• Outline the basic concepts and issues related to discourse understanding, reference resolution, and name coherent relations in a discourse.
• Describe the grammar induction method, which can induce grammars from data.
• Explain the following concepts or terms:
  • Discourse
  • Reference resolution
  • Coherence relations
  • Grammar induction

Objective Readings

Required readings:

Reading topics:

Schilder, F. (2002). Robust discourse parsing via discourse markers topicality and position. Natural Language Engineering, 8(2-3), 235-255.

Objective Questions

• What are the main tasks in understanding discourses beyond the basic syntactic analysis and semantic interpretation?

Objective Activities

• Explore other grammar learning methods based on different machine learning algorithms and data sets. Report your findings in the course conference.