One of the remarkable properties of Verb Second (V2) syntax is the fact that the constituent preceding the finite verb – let’s for simplicity call it ‘SpecCP’ – can under certain circumstances be dropped (cf. Ross 1982; Huang 1984; Fries 1988 for German, Ackema & Neeleman 2007 for Dutch). Pronoun drop is strictly confined to pronouns in SpecCP and can only occur in the root clause. In a context...

This paper proposes unsupervised word sense disambiguation based on automatically constructed case frames and its incorporation into our zero pronoun resolution system. The word sense disambiguation is applied to verbs and nouns. We consider that case frames define verb senses and semantic features in a thesaurus define noun senses, respectively, and perform sense disambiguation by selecting th...

Subjects completed sentences of the form NPl aux V NP2 because (but) Pro . . . (e.g., John may scold Bill because he . ..) with a reason or motive for the action described. A basic perceptual strategy was hbpothesized to underlie the comprehension of these sentences which have a potentially ambiguous pronoun in the subject position of the subordinate clause. It was expected that listeners would...

Even advanced Spanish speakers of second language English tend to confuse the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’, often without even noticing their mistake (Lahoz, 1991). A study by AntónMéndez (2010) has indicated that a possible reason for this error is the fact that Spanish is a pro-drop language. In order to test this hypothesis, we used an extension of Dual-path (Chang, 2002), a computational cogniti...

A Winograd schema is a pair of sentences that differ in a single word and that contain an ambiguous pronoun whose referent is different in the two sentences and requires the use of commonsense knowledge or world knowledge to disambiguate. This paper discusses how Winograd schemas and other sentence pairs could be used as challenges for machine translation using distinctions between pronouns, su...

Formal grammatical theories make extensive use of syntactic relations (e.g. c-command, Reinhart, 1983) in the description of constraints on antecedent-anaphor dependencies. Recent research has motivated a model of processing that exploits a cue-based retrieval mechanism in content-addressable memory (e.g. Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006) in which item-to-item syntactic relations such as c-com...

Anaphoric relations between pronouns and their antecedents are subject to a number of different linguistic constraints, which exclude the possibility of coreference in specific syntactic or discourse contexts. Constraints on anaphora may, in principle, impact online sentence processing in a couple of different ways. They may act as constraints on the generation of interpretations, preventing il...

This paper aims to clarify and resolve issues surrounding the so-called formal linking problem in interpreting the Internally Headed Relative Clause construction in Korean and Japanese, a problem that has been identified in recent E-type pronominal treatments of the construction (e.g., Hoshi 1995, Shimoyama 1999). In the literature, this problem refers to the difficulty of capturing the delimit...

We propose a neural machine translation architecture that models the surrounding text in addition to the source sentence. These models lead to better performance, both in terms of general translation quality and pronoun prediction, when trained on small corpora, although this improvement largely disappears when trained with a larger corpus. We also discover that attention-based neural machine t...