Expectations in Incremental Discourse Processing

Abstract

The way in which discourse features express connections back to the previous discourse has been described in the literature in terms of adjoining at the right frontier of discourse structure. But this does not allow for discourse features that express expectations about what is to come in the subsequent discourse. After characterizing these expectations and their distribution in text, we show how an approach that makes use of substitution as well as adjoining on a suitably defined right frontier, can be used to both process expectations and constrain discouse processing in general.