A Coherence Model Based on Syntactic Patterns

Annie Louis, Ani Nenkova

Abstract: We introduce a model of coherence which captures the intentional discourse structure in text. Our work is based on the hypothesis that syntax provides a proxy for the communicative goal of a sentence and therefore the sequence of sentences in a coherent discourse should exhibit detectable structural patterns. Results show that our method has high discriminating power for separating out coherent and incoherent news articles reaching accuracies of up to 90%. We also show that our syntactic patterns are correlated with manual annotations of intentional structure for academic conference articles and can successfully predict the coherence of abstract, introduction and related work sections of these articles.