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The project's aim is the development of a discourse grammar considering
formal approaches from Linguistics, Knowledge Representation formalisms as
well as findings from Cognitive Psychology. The investigations especially
take into account the procedural and incremental character of language
understanding/production. They go beyond current approaches that provide
only a declarative description of discourse structure. Employing an
underspecification formalism offers a flexibile approach for the analysis of
discourse ambiguities as well as for the incremental generation of text
chunks (e.g. generation of VP-ellipses). |
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Apart from the analysis of the discourse structure the investigations also
focus on the structure and the representation of the events described by a
text. Events are seen as conceptualisations of changes over time. There are
similarities between discourse structure and the conceptualisation of
events: temporal ordering and subdivision into parts. The structure of a
complex event, however, can differ from the structure of the text describing
this event. Consequently, the investigation of discourse structure and the
anchoring of temporal expressions in event structures is essential for
studying discourse and event structures. |
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