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<Paper uid="P96-1036">
  <Title>Functional Centering</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="323" end_page="323" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we provided an account for ordering the forward-looking centers which is entirely based on functional notions, grounded on the information structure of utterances in a discourse. We motivated our proposal by the constraints which hold for a free word order language such as German and derived our results from data-intensive empirical studies of (real-world) expository texts. We have gathered preliminary evidence that the functional ordering of discourse entities in the centers seems to coincide with the grammatical roles of fixed word order languages. We also augmented the ordering criteria of the forward-looking center such that it accounts not only for (pro)nominal but also for functional anaphora (textual ellipsis), an issue that, so far, has only been sketchily dealt with in the centering framework. The extensions we propose have been validated by the empirical analysis of real-world expository texts of considerable length. We thus follow methodological principles of corpus-based studies that have been successfully exercised in the work of Passonneau (1993). Still open are proper descriptions of deictic expressions, proper names (cf. the Alfa Romeo driving scenario), and plural or generic definite noun phrases. An anaphora resolution module and an ellipsis handler based on this functional centering model has been implemented as part of a comprehensive text parser for German.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Acknowledgments. We would like to thank our colleagues in the 8PSZY r group for fruitful discussions and Jon A1cantara (Cambridge, UK) for re-reading the final version via Interact. This work has been funded by LGFG Baden-Wiirttemberg (M. S trube).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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