研究话语中实体为何重要，发现多因素共同决定其突出性。
What makes an entity salient in discourse?
- 用摘要价值衡量话语层级显著性，分析多种语言特征
- 语义和结构特征比语法特征更能预测实体突出性
- 不同语体下显著性规律差异大，体现沟通意图影响
话语中的实体显著性存在差异：主要参与者、物体和地点保持突出，而其他实体则迅速被遗忘，引发关于人类如何标记和推断话语层面显著性的疑问。本文基于多个摘要中的摘要价值，对话语层级显著性进行分级操作化，探究话语层级显著性是否可由话语层级显著性特征预测，并分析这些特征在24种英语口语和书面语体中的交互作用。研究考察了语法功能、定指性、实体类型、线性顺序、话语关系与层级、指称结构等因素，以及语体的影响。结果表明，话语层级的预测因子与话语层级显著性显著相关，但受实体层级因素（如频率与文档内分布）调节。多因素模型显示，单一因素无法决定显著性；话语结构与语义特征比形态句法特征更具鲁棒性，且显著性规律在不同语体和交际意图间存在显著差异。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Entities in discourse vary in salience: main participants, objects and locations stay prominent, while others are quickly forgotten, raising questions about how humans signal and infer discourse-level salience. Using a graded operationalization of discourse-level salience based on summary-worthiness in multiple summaries, this paper investigates whether predictors of utterance-level prominence extend to the discourse level, and how they interact across 24 spoken and written genres of English. We examine features including grammatical function, definiteness, entity type, linear order, discourse relations and hierarchy, and referential structure, as well as the impact of genre. Our results show that utterance-level predictors significantly correlate with discourse-level salience, but interact with and are modulated by entity-level factors such as frequency and dispersion across the document. Multifactorial models reveal that no single factor determines salience; rather, discourse-structural and semantic features prove more robust than morphosyntactic ones, with substantial variation by genre and communicative intent.
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