rapaport@sunybcs (William J. Rapaport) (09/14/87)
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO GRADUATE GROUP IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE ALEXANDER NAKHIMOVSKY Department of Computer Science Colgate University THE REPRESENTATION AND PROCESSING OF NARRATIVES A narrative is a text with the following properties: (a) it is produced by one discourse participant (narrator); (b) it contains descriptions of situations evolving or persisting in time (I call them history-tokens, or h-tokens for short); (c) the time of a narrated h-token is determined with respect to the previously narrated h-tokens, and usually without reference to the time of discourse. In contrast to a conversation, the content of a narrative is decoupled from the linear progression of its text and unfolds in its own, separate timeline. Two structures are thus needed to represent a narrative: the Linear Text Structure (LTS), whose components are linked by rhetorical relations such as elaboration, resumption or flashback; and the Event-Situation Structure (ESS), whose components show the entire range of coherence and temporal relations. I hypothesize that in constructing the ESS, the rhetorical relations within it need not be recognized, although some LTS information is made available to the processing model in the form of heuristics for manipu- lating the WHEN-point of the Deictic Center, which I call the temporal focus. I adopt the following model of narrative processing. Next to ESS and LTS, there is a short-term memory structure called Current Focus Space (CFS) and a buffer in which the representation of the current sentence is assembled. Among the components of the CFS are the Deictic Center and the data structures needed for comprehension of definite anaphora. As each new sentence is processed, one of two things happens: either the representation of the sentence is incorporated in the CFS, with the focusing mechanisms appropriately modified, or, in case of a focus shift, the contents of the CFS are incorporated into the ESS and LTS, and the CFS is completely reset. In terms of linguistic structure, the sentence continues the same, or starts a new, discourse segment (DS). The subject of the talk is, mostly, the time-related factors (grammati- cal, lexical, and extra-linguistic) that help recognize a shift to a new DS. Monday, September 21, 1987 4:15 P.M. Baldy 684 There will be an informal discussion with Dr. Nakhimovsky on Monday evening at a time and place to be announced. Call Bill Rapaport (Dept. of Computer Science, 636-3193 or 3181) or Gail Bruder (Dept. of Psychol- ogy, 636-3676) for further information. William J. Rapaport Assistant Professor Dept. of Computer Science, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260 (716) 636-3193, 3180 uucp: ..!{ames,boulder,decvax,rutgers}!sunybcs!rapaport csnet: rapaport@buffalo.csnet internet: rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu [if that fails, try: rapaport%cs.buffalo.edu@relay.cs.net or: rapaport%cs.buffalo.edu@csnet-relay. ] bitnet: rapaport@sunybcs.bitnet