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Discourse Analysis
Little was done in discourse analysis before Indian-born Aravind JoshiÎéÎ÷s "Tree Adjunct Grammars" (1975) and Jerry HobbsÎéÎ÷ work at the SRI Intl ("Computational Approach to Discourse Analysis", 1976). Then Barbara Grosz ("The Representation and Use af Focus in a System for Understanding Dialogs", 1977), Bonnie Webber ("Inference in an Approach to Discourse Anaphora", 1978) and Candace Sidner ("Towards a Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse", 1979) established the field. They, as well as philosophers such as Hans Kamp in the Netherlands (founder of Discourse Representation Theory in 1981), embraced a more holistic approach to understanding "discourse", not just individual sentences. Meanwhile, a statistical technique that dated back to Melvin Maron and Gerard Salton represented a text as a "bag" of words, disregarding the order of the words and even the grammatical relationships.
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