The Need for Explicit Identification of Relations

As mentioned in the introduction, one goal of this work is to assess the adequacy of a recency-based focus model for this task and genre. To be well founded, such evaluations must be made with respect to a particular set of relations. For example, the modify relation supports a recency-based approach. Consider the following example, reproduced from Section 4.2:

Utterance	Interpretation
(1) Monday looks good.	Assume: Monday 19 August
(2) How about 2?	(co-reference relation) 2pm, Monday 19 August
(3) Hmm, how about 4?	(modify relation) 4pm, Monday 19 August

Because our model includes the modify anaphoric relation, the Temporal Unit in (2) is an appropriate antecedent for the one in (3). A model without this relation might require (3)'s antecedent to be provided by (1).