An embodied language-learning system is presented that can learn the correct deictic meanings for the words “I” and “you.” The system uses contextual clues from already understood words and sensory information from its environment to determine the most likely grounding for a new word. The system also serves as a model for the phenomenon of pronoun reversal among congenitally blind children, as ...

This paper describes a new automatic method for Japanese predicate argument structure analysis. The method learns relevant features to assign case roles to the argument of the target predicate using the features of the words located closest to the target predicate under various constraints such as dependency types, words, semantic categories, parts of speech, functional words and predicate voic...

In this paper we propose a computational treatment of the resolution of zero pronouns in Japanese discourse, using an adaptation of the centering algorithm. We are able to factor language-specific dependencies into one parameter of the centering algorithm. Previous analyses have stipulated that a zero pronoun and its cospecifier must share a grammatical function property such as Subject or NonS...

This study addresses pronominal anaphora resolution, including zero pronouns, in Chinese. A syntactic, rule-based pronoun resolution algorithm, the “Hobbs algorithm” was run on “gold standard” hand parses from the Penn Chinese Treebank. While first proposed for English, the algorithm counts for its success on two characteristics that Chinese and English have in common. Both languages are SVO, a...

This paper proposes a method of the zero pronoun resohition, which is one of the essential processes in understanding systems for Japanese manual sentences. It is based on pragmatic properties of Japanese conditionals. We examined a uumber of sentences appearing in Japanese manuals according to the classillcation based on the types of agent and the types of verb phrase. As ~ result, we obtained...

Dropped pronouns (DPs) are ubiquitous in pro-drop languages like Chinese, Japanese etc. Previous work mainly focused on painstakingly exploring the empirical features for DPs recovery. In this paper, we propose a neural recovery machine (NRM) to model and recover DPs in Chinese, so that to avoid the non-trivial feature engineering process. The experimental results show that the proposed NRM sig...

Anaphora resolution is one of the most important research topics in Natural Language Processing. In English, overt pronouns such as she and definite noun phrases such as the company are anaphors that refer to preceding entities (antecedents). In Japanese, anaphors are often omitted, and these omissions are called zero pronouns. There are two major approaches to zero pronoun resolution: the heur...

We present a cognitive computational model of pronoun resolution that reproduces the human interpretation preferences of the Subject Assignment Strategy and the Parallel Function Strategy. Our model relies on a probabilistic pronoun resolution system trained on corpus data. Factors influencing pronoun resolution are represented as features weighted by their relative importance. The importance t...

We present an automatic approach to determining whether a pronoun in text refers to a preceding noun phrase or is instead nonreferential. We extract the surrounding textual context of the pronoun and gather, from a large corpus, the distribution of words that occur within that context. We learn to reliably classify these distributions as representing either referential or non-referential pronou...