Abstract Anaphors in German and English

Anaphors in German and English Stefanie Dipper, Christine Rieger, Melanie Seiss, and Heike Zinsmeister 1 Ruhr-University Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany 2 University of Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany Abstract. Abstract anaphors refer to abstract referents such as facts or events. Automatic resolution of this kind of anaphora still poses a problem for language processing systems. The present paper presents a corpus-based comparative study on German and English abstract anaphors and their antecedents to gain further insights into the linguistic properties of different anaphor types and their distributions. To this end, parallel texts from the Europarl corpus have been annotated with functional and morpho-syntactic information. We outline the annotation process and show how we start out with a small set of well-defined markables in German. We successively expand this set in a cross-linguistic bootstrapping approach by collecting translation equivalents from English and using them to track down further forms of German anaphors, and, in the next turn, in English, etc. Abstract anaphors refer to abstract referents such as facts or events. Automatic resolution of this kind of anaphora still poses a problem for language processing systems. The present paper presents a corpus-based comparative study on German and English abstract anaphors and their antecedents to gain further insights into the linguistic properties of different anaphor types and their distributions. To this end, parallel texts from the Europarl corpus have been annotated with functional and morpho-syntactic information. We outline the annotation process and show how we start out with a small set of well-defined markables in German. We successively expand this set in a cross-linguistic bootstrapping approach by collecting translation equivalents from English and using them to track down further forms of German anaphors, and, in the next turn, in English, etc.