CoRE Building, Rm. From both a technological and a cognitive perspective, the alternatively maddening and wonderful thing about discourse is how much information it conveys implicitly, through mechanisms such as presupposition, implicature and adjacency-cued inferences, and how much through reduced linguistic devices such as anaphora, that get their meaning through the context that discourse builds up.
Discourse is rich in anaphora, with coreferring anaphors being only part of the story.
Coreference has been a mainstay of current LT applications because it is pervasive, useful and systematic enough to support empirical approaches. I shall argue that other forms of anaphora can make similar contributions to LT applications of the future. The talk defines the scope of anaphoric processes, briefly describing the PhD research of two of my students, and showing that adverbial discourse connectives can be treated as anaphors to support an approach to computing discourse semantics that strongly resembles that used to compute sentence-level semantics, thereby bringing discourse syntax and semantics more in line with sentence level grammar.