Pronoun resolution is an uncertain process in machine oriented natural language processing. There are many techniques to determine the referent of the pronoun. This paper addresses the resolution of two pronouns. "they" and "them". and looks at simplistic rules to improve the process of determining the referent, beyond simply deciding tm the basis of most recent plural noun.

A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, general cognitive structure-building processes make the firstmentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent...

Abstract The goal of this paper is to revisit the so-called aspectual se , frequently cited over last three decades as a new function reflexive pronouns in Spanish and other languages, which refers facultative uses pronoun where it has no effect on valency or diathesis verb. I will focus four empirical problems that such accounts face when dealing with corpus data: requirement delimited object ...

Several researchers have noted the local coherence exhibited by discourse (Sidner 1979; Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein 1983; Carter 1987; etc.). A primary component of this local coherence is the way the local focus of the discourse shifts from one sentence to the next and the way this shifting is marked by linguistic choices made by the writer/speaker. By local focus, we refer to that concept a s...

Abstract The goal of this paper is to revisit the so-called aspectual se , frequently cited over last three decades as a new function reflexive pronouns in Spanish and other languages, which refers facultative uses pronoun where it has no effect on valency or diathesis verb. I will focus four empirical problems that such accounts face when dealing with corpus data: requirement delimited object ...

We propose an unsupervised Expectation Maximization approach to pronoun resolution. The system learns from a fixed list of potential antecedents for each pronoun. We show that unsupervised learning is possible in this context, as the performance of our system is comparable to supervised methods. Our results indicate that a probabilistic gender/number model, determined automatically from unlabel...

We describe a system for contextually appropriate anaphor and pronoun generation for Turkish. It uses Binding Theory and Centering Theory to model local and nonlocal reference. We describe the rules for Turkish, and their computational treatment. A cascaded method for anaphor and pronoun generation is proposed for handling pro-drop and discourse constraints on pronominalization. The system has ...

Abstract We investigate the hypothesis that a pronoun is used in discourse, when its antecedent is in the focus of the discourse. We create a corpus of ‘replaced anaphoric definite descriptions’, where occurrences of definite descriptions are replaced with a corresponding pronoun. We use the Lappin and Leass (1994) anaphora resolution algorithm on the new corpus, and obtain a much lower perform...