Language and Logic advanced course:
Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on Discourse.

Teacher Abstract:

This course will present an overview of current research on discourse both from a theoretical and empirical point of view. I will begin with the theoretical point of view, concentrating on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), which has made most explicit the ties between discourse semantics and more traditional linguistic fields of pragmatics and semantics. I will also compare RST, DLTag and other theories to SDRT. I then will detail the empirical stumbling block for all of these theories, which is the scaling up to real world, domain independent texts. I will review empirical approaches to discourse parsing in an attempt to address this empirical problem. I will discuss corpus construction and learning methods, leaning on the results of the Penn Discourse Tree Bank, Graph Bank, and the SDRT annotation projects DISCOR and ANNODIS.