In this paper we describe the results of unsupervised (clustering) and supervised (classification) learning experiments with the purpose of recognising the function of singular neuter pronouns in Danish corpora of written and spoken language. Danish singular neuter pronouns comprise personal and demonstrative pronouns. They are very frequent and have many functions such as non-referential, cata...

Previous studies have suggested that ambiguous null pronouns are biased to co-refer with topical subject antecedents. In Italian, for example, Belletti, Bennati & Sorace (2007) (henceforth BB&S) suggested that null subject pronouns typically co-refer with already established topic antecedents ([topic shift]), whereas overt subject pronouns signal a change in topic ([+topic shift]). This discour...

Pronouns are frequently dropped in Chinese sentences, especially in informal data such as text messages. In this work we propose a solution to recover dropped pronouns in SMS data. We manually annotate dropped pronouns in 684 SMS files and apply machine learning algorithms to recover them, leveraging lexical, contextual and syntactic information as features. We believe this is the first work on...

Coreference resolution plays a critical role in discourse analysis. This paper focuses on exploiting zero pronouns to improve Chinese coreference resolution. In particular, a simplified semantic role labeling framework is proposed to identify clauses and to detect zero pronouns effectively, and two effective methods (refining syntactic parser and refining learning example generation) are employ...

Pronouns seem to be acquired in an asymmetrical way, where children confuse the meaning of pronouns with reflexives up to the age of six, but not vice versa. Children’s production of the same referential expressions is appropriate at the age of four. However, response-based tasks, the usual means to investigate child language comprehension, are very demanding given children’s limited cognitive ...

Anaphora resolution attempts to determine the correct antecedent of an anaphor (the term pointing back). In what follows, we propose an algorithm for the resolution of anaphoric pronouns that relies on lexical and syntactic knowledge incorporated in a modular approach based on constraints and preferences. Our objective was to find the correct antecedent to the following subject pronouns (il, il...

Four experimental studies were designed to test, in Norwegian, the hypothesis that children’s nonadultlike interpretations of pronouns may be partly attributable to a lexical factor interacting with the A-Chain Condition (Philip and Coopmans (1996), Sigurjónsdóttir and Coopmans (1996)). Analyzing the antisubject orientation of pronouns in adult Norwegian as an A-Chain Condition effect at Logica...

Children acquiring their native language (L1) have been reported to have greater difficulty in interpreting pronouns than reflexives. In addition, they are less accurate when pronouns refer to referential antecedents than to quantified antecedents, and when they hear full pronouns as opposed to reduced pronouns. We hypothesize that similar difficulties of interpretation will occur for (non-adva...

Personal pronouns and demonstratives contribute differently to the encoding of information in the mental model and they serve distinct backward- and forward-looking functions. While (unstressed) personal pronouns are the default means to indicate coreference with the most prominent discourse entity (backward-looking function) and typically mark the maintenance of the current topic, demonstrativ...

English pronouns must agree with their antecedents in number. But in some situations, pronouns violate this constraint, as in "I think I'll order a frozen margarita. I just love them." Three situations are identified in which such violations occur: (1) Plural (and technically illegal) pronouns are used to refer to frequently or multiply occurring items or events (as opposed to a unique item/eve...