MODELING LOCAL COHERENCE

Mirella Lapata
University of Edinburgh

Fri, November 9, 3:30pm, MJH Rm 126



In this talk we introduce a novel framework for representing and measuring local coherence. Central to this approach is the entity grid representation of discourse which captures patterns of entity distribution in a text. Inspired by Centering Theory, our algorithm automatically abstracts a text into a set of entity transition sequences and records distributional, syntactic, and referential information about discourse entities. We re-conceptualize coherence assessment as a learning task and show that our entity-based representation is well-suited for ranking-based generation and text classification tasks. Using the proposed representation, we achieve good performance on text ordering, summary coherence evaluation, and readability assessment.

(This talk reports joint work with Regina Barzilay.)