Abstract: Due to the lack of external formal marks, components in Chinese discourse can hardly be categorized into the traditional syntactic system. In fact, Chinese is a typical topic-prominent language, so it should rather be analyzed from the point of topic. This paper, targeting at computer processing, raises the concepts of punctuation clause, generalized topic, discourse structure and topic clause, and reveals the properties of Chinese discourse structure based on generalized topic. The applicability of this theory has been validated in an initial experiment.
In addition, the generalized topic framework REF defines punctuation clauses as the basic unit of Chinese discourse, and the concepts of the generalized topic and the topic clause is proposed to explicitly describe the topic structure in Chinese discourse.
On Generalized-Topic-Based Chinese Discourse Structure
Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Chinese Language Processing
Sociology Computer Science