Current Theories Of Centering For Pronoun Interpretation: A Critical Evaluation

A central claim of centering theory (Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein, 1995, henceforth GJW) is that certain entities mentioned in an utterance are more central than others, and that this property imposes constraints on a speaker’s use of different types of expressions to refer to them. To articulate some of these constraints, they define several fundamental centering concepts and propose rules based on them that should be followed by a speaker in producing coherent discourse. This work has led to several analyses employing centering theory and extensions of it, particularly in the area of pronoun interpretation (Kameyama, 1986; Brennan, Friedman, and Pollard, 1987; Di Eugenio, 1990; Walker, Iida, and Cote, 1994; Di Eugenio, 1996; Strube and Hahn, 1996, inter alia; see also citations within GJW, forthcoming papers in Walker, Joshi, and Prince (in press), and psycholinguistic studies described in Hudson-D’Zmura (1989), Gordon, Grosz, and Gilliom (1993), and Brennan (1995)). In this squib, we discuss some facets of the pronoun interpretation problem that motivate a centering-style analysis, and demonstrate some problems with a popular centering-based approach with respect to these motivations.