Bonnie Webber

Bio: Bonnie Webber is an academic researcher from University of Edinburgh. The author has contributed to research in topics: Treebank & Natural language. The author has an hindex of 50, co-authored 295 publications receiving 10984 citations. Previous affiliations of Bonnie Webber include University of Pennsylvania & Medical College of Wisconsin.

The Penn Discourse TreeBank 2.0.

Abstract: We present the second version of the Penn Discourse Treebank, PDTB-2.0, describing its lexically-grounded annotations of discourse relations and their two abstract object arguments over the 1 million word Wall Street Journal corpus. We describe all aspects of the annotation, including (a) the argument structure of discourse relations, (b) the sense annotation of the relations, and (c) the attribution of discourse relations and each of their arguments. We list the differences between PDTB-1.0 and PDTB-2.0. We present representative statistics for several aspects of the annotation in the corpus.

Simulating humans: computer graphics animation and control

Abstract: 1. Introduction and Historical Background 1.1 Why make human figure models? 1.2 Historical roots 1.3 What is currently possible? 1.4 Manipulation, animation, and simulation 1.5 What did we leave out? 2. Mody Modeling 2.1 Geometric body modeling 2.2 Representing articulated figures 2.3 A flexible torso model 2.4 Shoulder complex 2.5 Clothing models 2.6 The anthropometry database 2.7 The anthropometry spreadsheet 2.8 Strength and torque display 3. Spatial Interaction 3.1 Direct manipulation 3.2 Manipulation with constraints 3.3 Inverse kinematic positioning 4. Behavioral Control of Articulated Figures 4.1 An interactive system for postural control 4.2 Interactive manipulation with behaviors 4.3 The animation interface 4.4 Human figure motions 4.5 Virtual human control 5. Simulation with Societies of Behaviors 5.1 Forward simulation with behaviors 5.2 Locomotion 5.3 Strength guided motion 5.4 Collision-free path and motion planning 5.5 Posture planning 6. Task-level Specifications 6.1 Performance simulation with simple commands 6.2 Natural language expressions of kinematics and space 6.3 Task-level simulation 6.4 A framework for instruction understanding 7. Epilogue 7.1 A road map toward the future 7.2 Conclusion

The Penn Discourse Treebank

Abstract: This paper describes a new discourse-level annotation project – the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) – that aims to produce a large-scale corpus in which discourse connectives are annotated, along with their arguments, thus exposing a clearly defined level of discourse structure. The PDTB is being built directly on top of the Penn Treebank and Propbank, thus supporting the extraction of useful syntactic and semantic features and providing a richer substrate for the development and evaluation of practical algorithms. We present a preliminary analysis of inter-annotator agreement – both the level of agreement and the types of inter-annotator variation.

A Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora

Abstract: : Extended natural language communication between a person engaged in solving a problem or seeking information and a machine providing assistance requires the machine to be able to deal with anaphoric language in a perspicuous, transportable non-ad hoc way. This report takes the view that dealing with anaphoric language can be decomposed into two complementary tasks: (1) identifying what a text potentially makes available for anaphoric reference; and (2) constraining the candidate set of a given anaphoric expression down to one possible choice. The second task has been called the 'Anaphor resolution' problem and, to date, has stimulated much research in psychology and artificial intelligence natural language understanding. The focus of this report is the first task - that of identifying what a text makes available for anaphoric reference and how it does so.

Grounding in communication

Abstract: GROUNDING It takes two people working together to play a duet, shake hands, play chess, waltz, teach, or make love. To succeed, the two of them have to coordinate both the content and process of what they are doing. Alan and Barbara, on the piano, must come to play the same Mozart duet. This is coordination of content. They must also synchronize their entrances and exits, coordinate how loudly to play forte and pianissimo, and otherwise adjust to each other's tempo and dynamics. This is coordination of process. They cannot even begin to coordinate on content without assuming a vast amount of shared information or common ground-that is, mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual assumptions And to coordinate on process, they need to update their common ground moment by moment. All collective actions are built on common ground and its accumulation. We thank many colleagues for discussion of the issues we take up here.

The role of theories in conceptual coherence.

Abstract: The question of what makes a concept coherent (what makes its members form a comprehensible class) has received a variety of answers. In this article we review accounts based on similarity, feature correlations, and various theories of categorization. We find that each theory provides an inadequate account of conceptual coherence (or no account at all) because none provides enough constraints on possible concepts. We propose that concepts are coherent to the extent that they fit people's background knowledge or naive theories about the world. These theories help to relate the concepts in a domain and to structure the attributes that are internal to a concept. Evidence of the influence of theories on various conceptual tasks is presented, and the possible importance of theories in cognitive development is discussed.

Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue

Abstract: Traditional mechanistic accounts of language processing derive almost entirely from the study of monologue. Yet, the most natural and basic form of language use is dialogue. As a result, these accounts may only offer limited theories of the mechanisms that un- derlie language processing in general. We propose a mechanistic account of dialogue, the interactive alignment account, and use it to de- rive a number of predictions about basic language processes. The account assumes that, in dialogue, the linguistic representations em- ployed by the interlocutors become aligned at many levels, as a result of a largely automatic process. This process greatly simplifies production and comprehension in dialogue. After considering the evidence for the interactive alignment model, we concentrate on three aspects of processing that follow from it. It makes use of a simple interactive inference mechanism, enables the development of local di- alogue routines that greatly simplify language processing, and explains the origins of self-monitoring in production. We consider the need for a grammatical framework that is designed to deal with language in dialogue rather than monologue, and discuss a range of implica- tions of the account.