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<Paper uid="P98-2241">
  <Title>A Preliminary Model of Centering in Dialog*</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The centering framework (Grosz et al., 1995) is one of the most influential computational linguistics theories relating local focus to the form chosen for referring expressions. A number of studies have developed refinements and extensions of the theory (eg. Brennan et al., 1987; Kameyama, 1986; Strube and Hahn, 1996; Walker et al., 1998), but few have attempted to extend the model to multi-party discourse (cf. Brennan, 1998; Walker, 1998).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> For dialog systems, the benefits of using centering theory include improved reference resolution and generation of more coherent referring expressions. However, it is not at all clear how to adapt the theory for multi-party discourse. This paper examines some of the issues involved in adapting the theory, then describes the results of applying three alternative models to a corpus of 2-person dialogs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We chose very naive approximations to the original theory as a starting point. These results will be a baseline for evaluating more sophisticated models in the future.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>