This paper investigates the causes of the comparatively low success rates in finding the antecedents of plural pronouns as compared to finding antecedents of singular pronouns. We are trying to show experimentally that considering morphological agreement as a strong constraint in pronoun resolution results in the erroneous interpretation of almost a quarter of the plural pronouns. The work is b...

In this paper I propose a unified account of two phenomena that have so far only been treated independently of each other: (I.) the strong tendency of German demonstrative pronouns (henceforth: D-pronouns or DEM) like der and die to be resolved to antecedents that have not been maximally salient in the preceding sentence, and (II.) the fact that D-pronouns cannot be interpreted as syntactically...

Pronoun interpretation in English has been demonstrated to be sensitive to an interaction between grammatical and pragmatically-driven factors. This study investigated the interpretation of pronouns in Japanese, which has both null and overt forms. Thirty-two native speakers of Japanese per experiment participated in passage completion studies with transfer-of-possession contexts (Experiment 1)...

Previous research has shown that anaphor resolution in a non-native language may be more vulnerable to interference from structurally inappropriate antecedents compared to native anaphor resolution. To test whether previous findings on reflexive anaphors generalize to non-reflexive pronouns, we carried out an eye-movement monitoring study investigating the application of binding condition B dur...

We implement a fully probabilistic model to combine the hypotheses of a Spanish anaphora resolution system with those of a Spanish-English machine translation system. The probabilities over antecedents are converted into probabilities for the features of translated pronouns, and are integrated with phrase-based MT using an additional translation model for pronouns. The system improves the trans...

This paper evaluates the different tasks carried out in the translation of pronominal anaphora in a machine translation (MT) system. The MT interlingua approach named AGIR (Anaphora Generation with an Interlingua Representation) improves upon other proposals presented to date because it is able to translate intersentential anaphors, detect co-reference chains, and translate Spanish zero pronoun...

The paperpresents a computationally tractable application of Bulgarian pronouns representation using Universal Networking Language (UNL) formalism. It analyses grammar features of pronouns and offers a model of their formal representation based on incorporation of grammar, semantic and lexical knowledge by using standard UNL knowledge representation mechanisms. Also a comparison of different ap...

Young French children freely produce subject pronouns by the age of 2. However, by age 2 and a half they fail to interpret 3rd person pronouns in an experimental setting designed to select a referent among three participants (speaker, hearer, and other). No such problems are found with 1st and 2nd person pronouns. We formalize our analysis of these empirical results in terms of direction-sensit...

This paper presents a strategy and a computational model for solving inter-sentential anaphoric pronouns in Vietnamese paragraphs composing simple sentences. The strategy is proposed based on grammatical features of nouns and the focus phenomenon when using pronouns in Vietnamese. In this research, we consider only nouns and pronouns which are human objects in the paragraph, and each anaphoric ...