We report on an investigation of the pragmatic category of topic in Danish dialog and its correlation to surface features of NPs. Using a corpus of 444 utterances, we trained a decision tree system on 16 features. The system achieved nearhuman performance with success rates of 84–89% and F 1 -scores of – in 10fold cross validation tests (human performance: 89% and ). The most important features turned out to be preverbal position, definiteness, pronominalisation, and non-subordination. We discovered that NPs in epistemic matrix clauses (. “I think . . . ”) were seldom topics and we suspect that.
