Discourse Processing

Manfred Stede is a professor of Applied Computational Linguistics at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1996 with a thesis on language generation; in those years he studied discourse structure primarily for its role in text generation. After working for five years in a machine translation project at TU Berlin, he moved to Potsdam in 2001, where his interests shifted to text analysis. He conducted research projects on applications like information extraction and text summarization, and on more theoretical matters like the semantics and pragmatics of connectives. In conjunction with research on discourse parsing, he began to work on argumentation in the 2000s, focusing first on newspaper editorials. Following the design of an annotation scheme, he proceeded to work on approaches to deriving argumentation structure trees from short texts, and on various other aspects of argumentation mining.

• Introduction.- Large Discourse Units and Topics.- Coreference Resolution.- Small Discourse Units and Coherence Relations.- Summary: Text Structure on Multiple Interacting Levels.