Two experiments investigated whether the choice of anaphoric expression is affected by the presence of an addressee. Following a context sentence and visual scene, participants described a target scene that required anaphoric reference. They described the scene either to an addressee (Experiment 1) or without an addressee (Experiment 2). When an addressee was present in the task, participants u...

We report the results of a preliminary study attempting to identify ambiguous expressions in spoken language dialogues. In this study we developed methods for marking explicit ambiguity, and generalized previous proposals by Passonneau concerning a distance metric for anaphora to be used with the α coefficient to allow for ambiguous annotations.

In this study we investigate the comprehension of various kinds of anaphoric metaphors in context. We describe an experiment that manipulated the metaphoricity of simple noun + verb + ending sentences by using either a metaphoric noun or a metaphoric verb or both. Our results show that metaphoric nouns affect sentence comprehension to a greater extent than do metaphoric verbs. Thus, even though...

It has long been known that anaphoric relationships in the implicit meaning of an elided verb phrase depend on corresponding anaphoric relationships in the source of the ellipsis. This squib concernswhat the underlying cause of this dependency is. Does it arise directly through some uniform relation between the two clauses, or does it follow indirectly from independently motivated discourse pri...

An incremental semantics for a logic with dynamic binding is developed on the basis of a variable free notation for dynamic logic that takes its cue from De Bruijn's variable free notation for lambda calculus. De Bruijn indexing replaces variables by indices which indicate the distance to their binders. We propose to use reverse De Bruijn indexing, which works almost the same, only now the indi...

This study was undertaken to demonstrate that a property of verbs, implicit causality, is an important factor in determining coreference of potentially ambiguous anaphoric pronouns in a timed comprehension task. Subjects were required to decide the coreferentiality of a pronoun in pairs of sentences such as John telephoned Bill because he withheM some information~wanted some information. Verbs ...

In this paper, we represent singular definite noun phrases as functions in logical form. This representation is designed to model the behaviors of both anaphoric and non-anaphoric, distributive definites. It is also designed to obey the computational constraints suggested in Harper [Har88]. Our initial representation of a definite places an upper bound on its behavior given its structure and lo...