ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a theory for capturing one aspect of the connectivity of text, its event concept coherence (ECC). The construction of an ECC representation makes the following assumption: Two event descriptions in a piece of text are event concept coherent if the positions of the concepts they invoke are proximal to one another in the underlying conceptual network. The chapter explores the way-station status of the ECC representation scheme. The NEXUS knowledge base is a semantic network that contains approximately 150 concepts and some of the interrelationships amongst those concepts. The coherence building process works in a spreading activation fashion. Event concept coherence captured the mesh of mutually defining event/state concept interrelationships that are invoked by the descriptions of the text. Event concept coherence reflects the coherence of concepts described in the text as opposed to discourse coherence which captures the rhetorical intentions of the speaker.
