---
title: "Computing Parallelism in Discourse"
authors:
  - "Claire Gardent"
  - "Michael Kohlhase"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1997/147"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1997/0147.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1997
pages: "1016-1020"
track: "Natural-language Processing and Graphical Presentation"
keywords:
---

# Computing Parallelism in Discourse

Claire Gardent, Michael Kohlhase

*Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1016-1020.

## Abstract

Although much has been said about parallelism in discourse, a formal, computational theory of parallelism structure is still outstanding. In this paper, we present a theory which given two parallel utterances predicts which are the parallel elements. The theory consists of a sorted, higher-order abductive calculus and we show that it reconciles the insights of discourse theories of parallelism with those of Higher-Order Unification approaches to discourse semantics, thereby providing a natural framework in which to capture the effect of parallelism on discourse semantics.