Expectations in Incremental Discourse Processing

TL;DR

This paper explores how discourse features can express expectations about upcoming content and proposes a method using substitution and adjoining on a right frontier to process and constrain discourse understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that incorporates expectations into discourse processing by extending the right frontier concept with substitution techniques.

Findings

Discourse features can encode expectations about future discourse.

A method using substitution and adjoining effectively processes and constrains discourse.

The approach enhances understanding of discourse structure and expectations.

Abstract

The way in which discourse features express connections back to the previous discourse has been described in the literature in terms of adjoining at the right frontier of discourse structure. But this does not allow for discourse features that express expectations about what is to come in the subsequent discourse. After characterizing these expectations and their distribution in text, we show how an approach that makes use of substitution as well as adjoining on a suitably defined right frontier, can be used to both process expectations and constrain discouse processing in general.