Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

introduce a methodology for determining referents in full-length texts in a computationally parsimonious way. Based on the centering model, whose focus is on the local coherence of discourse, we build up a hierarchy of referential discourse segments from the local centering data. The spatial extension and nesting of these discourse segments constrain the reachability of potential antecedents of an anaphoric expression above the level of adjacent center pairs. Thus, the centering model is scaled up to the level of global discourse structure.