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Unit 3 — Discourse and Pragmatic Processing

Lesson 23 of 34 in the free Artificial Intelligence notes on Siksha Sarovar, written by Rohit Jangra.

Discourse and Pragmatic Processing

Sentences rarely appear alone — they occur in a discourse (a passage of connected sentences) embedded in a real-world context. The final two NLP stages handle meaning beyond the single sentence.

Discourse Processing

Discourse processing analyses relationships across multiple sentences — how they connect, and what they jointly refer to.

TaskDescriptionExample
Anaphora resolutionDetermining what a pronoun or reference refers to"Riya met Zoya. She smiled." — who does "she" refer to?
Coherence/cohesion analysisIdentifying how sentences logically connect (cause, contrast, elaboration)"It rained. So the match was postponed." (causal link)
Discourse structureRecognising the overall organisation of a text (narrative, argument, instructions)Detecting that a paragraph is a step-by-step recipe

Pragmatic Processing

Pragmatics is meaning that depends on real-world context, speaker intent, and shared knowledge — the same sentence can mean different things depending on who says it, when, and why.

TaskDescriptionExample
Speech act identificationRecognising the intended function of an utterance (statement, question, request, command)"Can you pass the salt?" — grammatically a question, pragmatically a request
ImplicatureUnderstanding meaning implied but not literally stated"Some students passed" often implies "not all students passed"
Context-dependent interpretationUsing situational context to resolve meaning"It's cold in here" said near an open window often means "please close the window"

Discourse vs Pragmatic — the Distinction

Discourse processingPragmatic processing
ScopeRelationships within the text (across sentences)Relationships between text and the outside world/context
Typical question answered"What does 'she' refer to?""What does the speaker actually want?"
Depends onPreceding/following sentencesSpeaker intent, situation, shared/world knowledge

Why These Stages Are Hardest

Syntax and semantics can often be handled with grammars and lexicons alone. Discourse and pragmatics require world knowledge and reasoning about intent — which is exactly why they connect back to the knowledge representation techniques of Unit 2 and are considered the most difficult, least fully "solved" parts of NLP.

Exam tip: a common question is "differentiate syntactic, semantic, discourse and pragmatic processing with examples" — use the comparisons across these three lessons as your answer skeleton.