An Extended Centering Theoretic Approach to the Recovery of Omitted Constituents in Korean Dialogues

Abstract

In Korean utterance constituents such as a subject NP and an object NP are frequently omitted when they can be recognized from dialogue context. Even in the dialogue-initial utterance a constituent may be omitted. This paper proposes that to find the referent of such missing constituents in Korean dialogue appropriately the rules such as initiation rule, vocative utterance rule, deletion rule, parallelism rule, and overriding rule be added to the existing Centering Theory (CT). This paper also shows that the extended CT based on our proposal is highly successful even in face-to-face Korean dialogue that is randomly collected from a daily soap opera.