Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse

By Barbara J. Grosz, Aravind K. Joshi, S. Weinstein. 1995

This paper concerns relationships among focus of attention, choice of referring expression, and perceived coherence of utterances within a discourse segment. It presents a framework and initial theory of centering intended to model the local component of attentional state. The paper examines interactions between local coherence and choice of referring expressions; it argues that differences in coherence correspond in part to the inference demands made by different types of referring expressions, given a particular attentional state. It demonstrates that the attentional state properties modeled by centering can account for these differences.

Subfields: Natural Language Processing

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Citations in the corpus

GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text (2019, background): “While humans would vary expressions in real texts, models rarely generate synonyms or referring expressions for entities, which does not follow the theory of centering in discourse analysis (Grosz et al., 1995).”
Neural Theory-of-Mind? On the Limits of Social Intelligence in Large LMs (2022, background): “At any given time, most text focuses on describing one protagonist and their relation to their surroundings, according to Centering Theory (Grosz et al., 1995).”
Learning-Based Single-Document Summarization with Compression and Anaphoricity Constraints (2016, background): “What kind of cross-sentential coherence do we need to ensure for the kinds of summaries our system produces? Many notions of coherence are useful, including centering theory (Grosz et al., 1995) and lexical cohesion (Nishikawa et al.”
BIGPATENT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Abstractive and Coherent Summarization (2019, positive): “To study the discourse structure of summaries, we analyze the distribution of entities that are indicative of coherence (Grosz et al., 1995; Strube and Hahn, 1999).”
Easy Victories and Uphill Battles in Coreference Resolution (2013, background): “And ﬁnally, rather than targeting centering theory (Grosz et al., 1995) with rule-based features identifying syntactic positions (Stoyanov et al., 2010; Haghighi and Klein, 2010), our features on word context can identify conﬁgurational clues like whether a mention is preceded or followed by a…”
Modeling Local Coherence: An Entity-Based Approach (2005, background): “frequency,1 following the widely accepted view that the occurrence frequency of an entity correlates with its discourse prominence (Morris and Hirst, 1991; Grosz et al., 1995).”
A Model of Coherence Based on Distributed Sentence Representation (2014, background): “Coherence In addition to the early computational work discussed above, local coherence was extensively studied within the modeling framework of Centering Theory (Grosz et al., 1995; Walker et al., 1998; Strube and Hahn, 1999; Poesio et al., 2004), which provides principles to form a coherence metric”
Individual and Domain Adaptation in Sentence Planning for Dialogue (2007, methodology): “Knott, 1998). In SPaRKy, the SPG takes a bottom-up approach to discourse planning using principles from Centering Theory ( Grosz, Joshi, & Weinstein, 1995 ).”
Unsupervised Learning of Narrative Event Chains (2008, methodology): “Our model is inspired by Centering (Grosz et al., 1995) and other entity-based models of coherence (Barzilay and Lapata, 2005) in which an entity is in focus through a sequence of sentences.”
Ellipsis Sites as Definite Descriptions (2008, background): “…then, that the licensing of VP-ellipsis makes reference to the meaning of the antecedent (in this case, roughly, the property of seeing something) or to an abstract level of syntactic representation at which someone and anyone are identical or share identical parts (Sag 1976:158, Johnson 2001:469).”
Do Long-Range Language Models Actually Use Long-Range Context? (2021, background): “Understanding long documents requires modeling various discourse-level phenomena, including anaphora (Hobbs, 1979; Grosz et al., 1995), argu-ment structure (Grimshaw, 1990), narrative scripts and trajectories (Schank and Abelson, 1977; Labov and Waletzky, 1997), and causal links between concepts…”
Simple Coreference Resolution with Rich Syntactic and Semantic Features (2009, background): “This choice reﬂects the intuition of Grosz et al. (1995) that speakers only use pronominal mentions when there are not intervening compatible S !!!!!!!"""""""”
Equal Treatment for All Antecedents: How Children Succeed with Principle B (2009, background): “However, we speculate that it may not have been immediately apparent to children that the possessor Cinderella was a viable referent for the pronoun (see Spenader, Smits, and Hendriks 2007 for remarks on applying Centering Theory (Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein 1995) to Principle B studies).”
Beyond Word Frequency: Bursts, Lulls, and Scaling in the Temporal Distributions of Words (2009, background): “The model we develop to explain these observations shares the generative spirit of local (n-gram) and weakly non-local models of text classification and generation [29, 30, 31].”
A Neural Local Coherence Model (2017, methodology): “Several formal theories of coherence have been proposed (Mann and Thompson, 1988a; Grosz et al., 1995; Asher and Lascarides, 2003), and their principles have inspired development of many existing coherence models (Barzilay and Lapata, 2008; Lin et al., 2011; Li and Hovy, 2014).”
Type B Reflexivization as an Unambiguous Testbed for Multilingual Multi-Task Gender Bias (2020, background): “Introducing a new referent in a discourse, usually comes at a cognitive cost when processing the sentence if the referent is not already salient (Grosz et al., 1995).”