Abstract

   We present a method for improving local coherence in German with a
    positive impact on automatically as well as human-generated texts.
    We demonstrate that local coherence crucially depends on which
    constituent occupies the initial position in a sentence. To support
    our hypothesis, we provide statistical evidence based on a corpus
    investigation and on results of an experiment with human judges.
    Additionally, we implement our findings in a generation module for
    determining the Vorfeld constituent automatically.