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Concept of Coherence: Coherence Relation Between Utterances

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10 views5 pages

Concept of Coherence: Coherence Relation Between Utterances

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kumarmrce
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Concept of Coherence

Coherence and discourse structure are interconnected in many ways. Coherence,


along with property of good text, is used to evaluate the output quality of natural
language generation system. The question that arises here is what does it mean for a
text to be coherent? Suppose we collected one sentence from every page of the
newspaper, then will it be a discourse? Of-course, not. It is because these sentences do
not exhibit coherence. The coherent discourse must possess the following properties −

Coherence relation between utterances


The discourse would be coherent if it has meaningful connections between its
utterances. This property is called coherence relation. For example, some sort of
explanation must be there to justify the connection between utterances.

Relationship between entities


Another property that makes a discourse coherent is that there must be a certain kind
of relationship with the entities. Such kind of coherence is called entity-based
coherence.

Discourse structure
An important question regarding discourse is what kind of structure the discourse
must have. The answer to this question depends upon the segmentation we applied on
discourse. Discourse segmentations may be defined as determining the types of
structures for large discourse. It is quite difficult to implement discourse
segmentation, but it is very important for information retrieval, text summarization
and information extraction kind of applications.

Algorithms for Discourse Segmentation


In this section, we will learn about the algorithms for discourse segmentation. The
algorithms are described below −

Unsupervised Discourse Segmentation


The class of unsupervised discourse segmentation is often represented as linear
segmentation. We can understand the task of linear segmentation with the help of an
example. In the example, there is a task of segmenting the text into multi-paragraph
units; the units represent the passage of the original text. These algorithms are
dependent on cohesion that may be defined as the use of certain linguistic devices to
tie the textual units together. On the other hand, lexicon cohesion is the cohesion that
is indicated by the relationship between two or more words in two units like the use of
synonyms.

Supervised Discourse Segmentation


The earlier method does not have any hand-labeled segment boundaries. On the other
hand, supervised discourse segmentation needs to have boundary-labeled training
data. It is very easy to acquire the same. In supervised discourse segmentation,
discourse marker or cue words play an important role. Discourse marker or cue word
is a word or phrase that functions to signal discourse structure. These discourse
markers are domain-specific.

Text Coherence
Lexical repetition is a way to find the structure in a discourse, but it does not satisfy
the requirement of being coherent discourse. To achieve the coherent discourse, we
must focus on coherence relations in specific. As we know that coherence relation
defines the possible connection between utterances in a discourse. Hebb has proposed
such kind of relations as follows −

We are taking two terms S0 and S1 to represent the meaning of the two related
sentences −

Result
It infers that the state asserted by term S0 could cause the state asserted by S1. For
example, two statements show the relationship result: Ram was caught in the fire. His
skin burned.

Explanation
It infers that the state asserted by S1 could cause the state asserted by S0. For example,
two statements show the relationship − Ram fought with Shyam’s friend. He was
drunk.

Parallel
It infers p(a1,a2,…) from assertion of S0 and p(b1,b2,…) from assertion S1. Here ai
and bi are similar for all i. For example, two statements are parallel − Ram wanted
car. Shyam wanted money.

Elaboration
It infers the same proposition P from both the assertions − S0 and S1 For example, two
statements show the relation elaboration: Ram was from Chandigarh. Shyam was
from Kerala.

Occasion
It happens when a change of state can be inferred from the assertion of S0, final state
of which can be inferred from S1 and vice-versa. For example, the two statements
show the relation occasion: Ram picked up the book. He gave it to Shyam.
Building Hierarchical Discourse Structure
The coherence of entire discourse can also be considered by hierarchical structure
between coherence relations. For example, the following passage can be represented
as hierarchical structure −


S1 − Ram went to the bank to deposit money.


S2 − He then took a train to Shyam’s cloth shop.


S3 − He wanted to buy some clothes.


S4 − He do not have new clothes for party.


S5 − He also wanted to talk to Shyam regarding his health

Reference Resolution
Interpretation of the sentences from any discourse is another important task and to
achieve this we need to know who or what entity is being talked about. Here,
interpretation reference is the key element. Reference may be defined as the linguistic
expression to denote an entity or individual. For example, in the passage, Ram, the
manager of ABC bank, saw his friend Shyam at a shop. He went to meet him, the
linguistic expressions like Ram, His, He are reference.

On the same note, reference resolution may be defined as the task of determining
what entities are referred to by which linguistic expression.

Types of Referring Expressions


Let us now see the different types of referring expressions. The five types of referring
expressions are described below −

Indefinite Noun Phrases


Such kind of reference represents the entities that are new to the hearer into the
discourse context. For example − in the sentence Ram had gone around one day to
bring him some food − some is an indefinite reference.

Definite Noun Phrases


Opposite to above, such kind of reference represents the entities that are not new or
identifiable to the hearer into the discourse context. For example, in the sentence - I
used to read The Times of India – The Times of India is a definite reference.

Pronouns
It is a form of definite reference. For example, Ram laughed as loud as he could. The
word he represents pronoun referring expression.

Demonstratives
These demonstrate and behave differently than simple definite pronouns. For
example, this and that are demonstrative pronouns.

Names
It is the simplest type of referring expression. It can be the name of a person,
organization and location also. For example, in the above examples, Ram is the name-
refereeing expression.

Reference Resolution Tasks


The two reference resolution tasks are described below.

Coreference Resolution
It is the task of finding referring expressions in a text that refer to the same entity. In
simple words, it is the task of finding corefer expressions. A set of coreferring
expressions are called coreference chain. For example - He, Chief Manager and His -
these are referring expressions in the first passage given as example.

Constraint on Coreference Resolution


In English, the main problem for coreference resolution is the pronoun it. The reason
behind this is that the pronoun it has many uses. For example, it can refer much like
he and she. The pronoun it also refers to the things that do not refer to specific things.
For example, It’s raining. It is really good.

Pronominal Anaphora Resolution


Unlike the co-reference resolution, pronominal anaphora resolution may be defined as
the task of finding the antecedent for a single pronoun. For example, the pronoun is
his and the task of pronominal anaphora resolution is to find the word Ram because
Ram is the antecedent.

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