Integrating Gricean and Attentional Constraints

Abstract

This paper concerns how to generate and understand discourse anaphoric noun phrases. I present the results of an analysis of all discourse anaphoric noun phrases (N=1,233) in a corpus of ten narrative monologues, where the choice between a definite pronoun or phrasal NP conforms largely to Gricean constraints on informativeness. I discuss Dale and Reiter's [To appear] recent model and show how it can be augmented for understanding as well as generating the range of data presented here. I argue that integrating centering [Grosz et al., 1983] [Kameyama, 1985] with this model can be applied uniformly to discourse anaphoric pronouns and phrasal NPs. I conclude with a hypothesis for addressing the interaction between local and global discourse processing.