Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One major element of discourse understcinding is to perceive coherence relations between portions of the discourse. Previous computational approaches to coherence relations reasoning have focused only on expository discourse, such as task-oriented dialog or database querying. For these approaches, the main processing concern is the clarity of the information that is to be conveyed. However, in a persuasive discourse, such as debates or advertising, the emphasis is on the adequacy of presenting the information, not just on clarity. This paper proposes a formaUsm and a system in which coherence relations corresponding to speech actions such as clarify, make adequate and remind are represented. Furthermore, in relating to human reasoning in general where studies have revealed that implicational and associative reasoning schema are prevalent across various domains, this formalism demonstrates that coherence relation reasoning is similar to this human reasoning, in the sense that coherence relations can be defined by domain independent implicational and associative schema. A prototype system based on this formalism is also demonstrated in this paper in which real world advertisements are processed.