<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="P97-1014">
  <Title>Centering in-the-Large: Computing Referential Discourse Segments</Title>
  <Section position="9" start_page="110" end_page="110" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
7 Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have developed a proposal for extending the centering model to incorporate the global referential structure of discourse for reference resolution. The hierarchy of discourse segments we compute realizes certain constraints on the reachability of antecedents. Moreover, the claim is made that the hierarchy of discourse segments implements an intuitive notion of the limited attention constraint, as we avoid a simplistic, cognitively implausible linear backward search for potentional discourse referents. Since we operate within a functional framework, this study also presents one of the rare formal accounts of thematic progression patterns for full-fledged texts which were informally introduced by Dane~ (1974).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The model, nevertheless, still has several restrictions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> First, it has been developed on the basis of a small corpus of written texts. Though these cover diverse text sorts (viz. technical product reviews, newspaper articles and literary narratives), we currently do not account for spoken monologues as modelled, e.g., by Passonneau &amp; Litman (1993) or even the intricacies of dyadic conversations Ros6 et al. (1995) deal with. Second, a thorough integration of the referential and intentional description of discourse segments still has to be worked out.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Acknowledgments. We like to thank our colleagues in the CLIF group for fruitful discussions and instant support, Joe Bush who polished the text as a native speaker, the three anonymous reviewers for their critical comments, and, in particular, Bonnie Webber for supplying invaluable comments to an earlier draft of this paper. Michael Strube is supported by a postdoctoral grant from DFG (Str 545/1-1).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>