Previous work on pronouns in SMT has focussed on third-person pronouns, treating them all as anaphoric. Little attention has been paid to other uses or other types of pronouns. Believing that further progress requires careful analysis of pronouns as a whole, we have analysed a parallel corpus of annotated English-German texts to highlight some of the problems that hinder progress. We combine th...

Five studies explored the ways relative rank is revealed among individuals in small groups through their natural use of pronouns. In Experiment 1, four-person groups worked on a decision-making task with randomly assigned leadership status. In Studies 2 and 3, two-person groups either worked on a task or chatted informally in a get-to-know-you session. Study 4 was a naturalistic study of incomi...

In two self-paced reading experiments we asked whether late, highly proficient, English-Spanish bilinguals are able to process language-specific morpho-syntactic information in their second language (L2). The processing of Spanish clitic pronouns' word order was tested in two sentential constructions. Experiment 1 showed that English-Spanish bilinguals performed similarly to Spanish-English bil...

We propose an annotation framework to explicitly identify dropped subject pronouns in Chinese. We acknowledge and specify 10 concrete pronouns that exist as words in Chinese and 4 abstract pronouns that do not correspond to Chinese words, but that are recognized conceptually, to native Chinese speakers. These abstract pronouns are identified as “unspecified”, “pleonastic”, “event”, and “existen...

First, we survey the nonstandard or exaggerated linguistic characteristics that Englishlanguage genealogical text (and indeed that of other languages) often exhibits. For example, in English genealogical prose frequent repetition of subject pronouns is avoided---they are simply dropped, though this would usually be considered ungrammatical except in diaries. Also, genealogical text frequently m...

Personal pronouns have been shown to influence cognitive perspective taking during comprehension. Studies using single sentences found that 3rd person pronouns facilitate the construction of a mental model from an observer's perspective, whereas 2nd person pronouns support an actor's perspective. The direction of the effect for 1st person pronouns seems to depend on the situational context. In ...

In this paper we describe the results of unsupervised (clustering) and supervised (classification) learning experiments with the purpose of recognising the function of singular neuter pronouns in Danish corpora of written and spoken language. Danish singular neuter pronouns comprise personal and demonstrative pronouns. They are very frequent and have many functions such as non-referential, cata...

This paper presents an exploratory study on the usage of epicene pronouns in speech Chinese EL2 students, who were undertaking a Master’s programme UK. The reasons for speakers’ use or non-use is also explored to provide fuller picture as well their perceptions gender-inclusive pronouns. An elicitation based speaking task was used gather pronoun usage. followed by semi-structured interview util...

Pronouns are frequently dropped in Chinese sentences, especially in informal data such as text messages. In this work we propose a solution to recover dropped pronouns in SMS data. We manually annotate dropped pronouns in 684 SMS files and apply machine learning algorithms to recover them, leveraging lexical, contextual and syntactic information as features. We believe this is the first work on...

Coreference resolution plays a critical role in discourse analysis. This paper focuses on exploiting zero pronouns to improve Chinese coreference resolution. In particular, a simplified semantic role labeling framework is proposed to identify clauses and to detect zero pronouns effectively, and two effective methods (refining syntactic parser and refining learning example generation) are employ...