Intention-based segmentation: Human reliability and correlation with linguistic cues

Rebecca J. Passonneau, Diane J. Litman

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

96 Scopus citations

Abstract

Certain spans of utterances in a discourse, referred to here as segments, are widely assumedto form coherent units. Further, the segmental structure of discourse has been claimed to constrain and be constrained by many phenomena. However, there is weak consensus on the nature of segments and the criteria for recognizing or generating them. We present quantitative results of a two part study using a corpus of spontaneous, narrative monologues. The first part evaluates the statistical reliability of human segmentation of our corpus, where speaker intention is the segmentation criterion. We then use the subjects' segmentations to evaluate the correlation of discourse segmentation with three linguistic cues (referential noun phrases, cue words, and pauses), using information retrieval metrics.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)148-155
Number of pages8
JournalProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume1993-June
StatePublished - 1993
Event31st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 1993 - Columbus, United States
Duration: Jun 22 1993Jun 26 1993

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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