in order to examine the prevalence of thyroid disease in a hospital outpatient setting, in an area of sufficient iodine intake, serum levels of tsh, t4, t3, anti-tg and anti-tpo antibodies were examined in 909 individuals with an age range of 12.4 to 88.5 years, participating in a checkup outpatient setting. the study was conducted in henry dynant hospital located in the metropolitan area of at...

The Idiap NLP Group has participated in both DiscoMT 2015 sub-tasks: pronounfocused translation and pronoun prediction. The system for the first sub-task combines two knowledge sources: grammatical constraints from the hypothesized coreference links, and candidate translations from an SMT decoder. The system for the second sub-task avoids hypothesizing a coreference link, and uses instead a lar...

We extend Zhao and Ng's (2007) Chinese anaphoric zero pronoun resolver by (1) using a richer set of features and (2) exploiting the coreference links between zero pronouns during resolution. Results on OntoNotes show that our approach significantly outperforms two state-of-the-art anaphoric zero pronoun resolvers. To our knowledge, this is the first work to report results obtained by an end-toe...

Event anaphora resolution plays a critical role in discourse analysis. This paper proposes a tree kernel-based framework for event pronoun resolution. In particular, a new tree expansion scheme is introduced to automatically determine a proper parse tree structure for event pronoun resolution by considering various kinds of competitive information related with the anaphor and the antecedent can...

Kehler and Rohde (2013) proposed a Bayesian theory of pronoun interpretation where the influence of world knowledge emerges as effects on the prior and the influence of information structure as effects on the likelihood: P(referent|pronoun) μ P(pronoun|referent)P(referent). Here we present two experiments on Mandarin Chinese that allow us to test the generality of the theory for a language with...

There are two main approaches to the problem of donkey anaphora (e.g. John owns a donkey. He beats it). Proponents of Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982) revise quantification so as to allow an existential quantifier to bind a pronoun which is not within its syntactic scope which yields a formal link between the quantifier and the pronoun, as is illustrated in (1)a. By contra...

The paper provides an analysis of the construction in Hungarian known as focus raising, illustrated below. János-t mond-t-am hogy jön John-ACC say-PAST-1SG that come.3SG ‘It is John that I said is coming.’ In focus raising, the focus of the matrix clause is identified with a grammatical function in the embedded clause. Focus raising is particularly interesting because of the case marking on foc...

In addition to its use as complementizer or relativizer (henceforth optional that), that can also occur as a demonstrative determiner (henceforth determiner that) or pronoun (henceforth pronoun that). So, if the embedded subject of a complement or relative clause begins with determiner that, (3a), or if the subject is a pronoun that, (3b), speakers have the option to avoid uttering two adjacent...

This paper applies resolution theorem proving to natural language semantics. The aim is to circumvent the computational complexity triggered by natural language ambiguities like pronoun binding, by interleaving pronoun binding with resolution deduction. To this end, disambiguation is only applied to expressions that actually occur during derivations. Given a set of premises and a conclusion, ou...

When bilinguals process written language, they show delays in accessing lexical items relative to monolinguals. The present study investigated whether this effect extended to spoken language comprehension, examining the processing of sentences with either low or high semantic constraint in both first and second languages. English-German bilinguals, German-English bilinguals and English monoling...