LOT Winter school course - Computational analysis of discourse

Course description

This course will provide an overview of issues, techniques and applications in computational analysis of discourse. We will examine mainly two phenomena: co-reference and coherence relations, both within a genre perspective. After studying previous research in this area, we will focus on how discourse phenomena are important in a particular computational application, that of extracting sentiment and opinion automatically.

Note that there will not be class on Friday

Schedule and readings

Lecture 1 (January 7): Introduction; segmenting discourse; genre

• Webber, Bonnie, Markus Egg and Valia Kordoni (2012) Discourse structure and language technology. Natural Language Engineering 18 (4): 437–490.
• Petrenz, Philipp and Bonnie Webber (2011) Stable classification of text genres. Computational Linguistics, 37 (2): 385-393.
• Hearst, Marti (1997) TextTiling: Segmenting text into multi-paragraph subtopic passages. Computational Linguistics, 23 (1): 33-64..

Lecture 2 (January 8): Co-reference

• Jurafsky, Daniel and James H. Martin (2009) Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Chapter 21, Computational Discourse).
• Morris, Jane and Graeme Hirst (1991) Lexical cohesion computed by thesaural relations as an indicator of the structure of text. Computational Linguistics, 17 (1): 21-48.
• Lee, Heeyoung, Yves Peirsman, Angel Chang, Nathanael Chambers, Miahi Surdeanu and Daniel Jurafsky (2011) Stanford's multi-pass sieve coreference resolution system at the CoNLL-2011 shared task, Proceedings of the CoNLL-2011 Shared Task.

Lecture 3 (January 9): Coherence relations

• Taboada, Maite and William C. Mann (2006) Rhetorical Structure Theory: Looking back and moving ahead. Discourse Studies, 8 (3): 423-459.
• Marcu, Daniel (2000) The rhetorical parsing of unrestricted texts: A surface based approach. Computational Linguistics, 26 (3): 395-448.
• Louis, Annie, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind K Joshi and Ani Nenkova (2010) Using entity features to classify implicit discourse relations, Proceedings of the SIGDIAL conference (pp. 59-62). Tokyo, Japan.

Lecture 4 (January 10): An application: sentiment analysis

• Taboada, Maite, Julian Brooke, Milan Tofiloski, Kimberly Voll and Manfred Stede (2011) Lexicon-based methods for sentiment analysis. Computational Linguistics, 37 (2): 267-307.
• Liu, Bing (2010) Sentiment analysis and subjectivity. In N. Indurkhya and D. F. J. (Eds.), Handbook of Natural Language Processing. Boca Raton, Fl: CRC Press.

Background and additional readings

• Asher, Nicholas, Farah Benamara and Yvette Yannick Mathieu (2009) Appraisal of opinion expressions in discourse. Linguisticae Investigationes, 32 (2): 279-292.
• Finn, Aidan and Nicholas Kushmerick (2006) Learning to classify documents according to genre. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57 (11): 1506-1518.
• Hernault, Hugo, Helmut Prendinger, David A. duVerle and Mitsuru Ishizuka (2010) HILDA: A discourse parser using Support Vector Machine classification. Dialogue and Discourse, 1 (3).
• Jurafsky, Daniel and James H. Martin (2009) Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Kessler, Brett, Geoffrey Nunberg and Hinrich Schütze (1997) Automatic detection of text genre, Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 32-38). Madrid, Spain.
• Liu, Bing (2012) Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining: Morgan & Claypool.
• Miltsakaki, Eleni and Karen Kukich (2004) Evaluation of text coherence for electronic essay scoring systems. Natural Language Engineering, 10 (1): 25-55.
• Mitkov, Ruslan (1999) Anaphora resolution: The state of the art. Unpublished manuscript, Wolverhampton.
• Mitkov, Ruslan (2002) Anaphora Resolution. London: Pearson Education Limited.
• Pang, Bo and Lillian Lee (2008) Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis. Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, 2 (1-2): 1-135.
• Stede, Manfred (2012) Discourse Processing: Morgan & Claypool.
• Teufel, Simone and Marc Moens (2002) Summarizing scientific articles: Experiments with relevance and rhetorical structure. Computational Linguistics, 28 (4): 409-445.
• Tofiloski, Milan, Julian Brooke and Maite Taboada (2009) A syntactic and lexical-based discourse segmenter, Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 77-80). Singapore.