Interpretation of a pronoun is driven by properties of syntactic distribution. Consequently, acquiring the meaning and the distribution are intertwined. In order to learn that a pronoun is reflexive, learners need to know which entity the pronoun refers to in a sentence, but in order to infer its referent they need to know that the pronoun is reflexive. This study examines whether discourse inf...

Two self-paced reading-time experiments are reported that examine the time course of pronoun interpretation processes based on local discourse structure and on world knowledge. The characterization of local discourse structure is based on recent work on centering, which provides a specific formulation of how the ways in which sentences make reference to common entities determines the coherence ...

In Koornneef and Van Berkum's (2006) eye-tracking study of implicit causality (Caramazza, Grober, Garvey, & Yates, 1977), midsentence delays were observed in the processing of sentences such as "David blamed Linda because she((bias-congruent))/he((bias-incongruent)) . . . " when the pronoun following because was incongruent with the bias of the implicit-causality verb. The authors suggested tha...

Syntactic knowledge is important for pronoun resolution. Traditionally, the syntactic information for pronoun resolution is represented in terms of features that have to be selected and defined heuristically. In the paper, we propose a kernel-based method that can automatically mine the syntactic information from the parse trees for pronoun resolution. Specifically, we utilize the parse trees d...

The cross-lingual pronoun prediction task at WMT 2016 requires to restore the missing target pronouns from source text and target lemmatized and POS-tagged translations. We study the benefits for this task of a specific Pronoun Language Model (PLM), which captures the likelihood of a pronoun given the gender and number of the nouns or pronouns preceding it, on the target-side only. Experimentin...

This paper discusses a corpus-based investigation of the distribution of the thirdperson neuter singular pronoun in Dutch (“het”). We labeled all pronominal occurrences of “het” in a large corpus of documents. On the basis of the annotated corpora, we developed an automatic classification system using machine learning techniques to distinguish between the different uses of the neuter pronoun. A...

This paper presents a solution for resolving inter-sentential anaphoric pronoun “nó” in Vietnamese paragraphs composing 3 to 5 simple sentences. In Vietnamese, “nó” is a special pronoun, can be used to indicate human, animal or non-animate object depending on the content and context of the paragraph (so in English, we should use “he”, “she” or “it”) . The proposed solution consists of some find...

We describe three experiments that use priming methodology to investigate the nature of the abstract mental representations activated during pronoun resolution, in order to contribute to our understanding of how structural representations and semantic coherence representations influence pronoun interpretation. The results of Experiment 1 suggest that there exists a level of abstract anaphoric d...

A recently-proposed machine learning approach to reference resolution — the twin-candidate approach — has been shown to be more promising than the traditional single-candidate approach. This paper presents a pronoun interpretation system that extends the twin-candidate framework by (1) equipping it with the ability to identify non-referential pronouns, (2) training different models for handling...