This paper presents an empirical evaluation of a pronoun resolution algorithm augmented with discourse segmentation information. Past work has shown that segmenting discourse can aid in pronoun resolution by making potentially erroneous candidates inaccessible to a pronoun’s search. However, implementing this in practice has been difficult given the complexities associated with deciding on a us...

Malay diri þ pronoun appears on initial examination to be a counter example to the typological claims made in the literature regarding the properties of long distance (LD) reflexives. It has been claimed that (1) LD reflexives are monomorphemic; (2) LD reflexives are subject oriented; (3) in languages without subject–verb agreement, LD reflexives manifest the Blocking Effect, the blocking of a ...

A memory-based processing approach to discourse comprehension emphasizes the rapid deployment of information in memory to facilitate understanding of the text that is currently being read. S. B. Greene, R. J. Gerrig, G. McKoon, and R. Ratcliff (1994) demonstrated that when a text described the reunion of 2 characters who had previously discussed a 3rd character, the accessibility of the 3rd cha...

The referent of a nonreflexive pronoun depends on context, but the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. For instance, in causal dependent clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (Sally frightens Mary because she … vs. Sally loves Mary because she …). Several theories claim that verbs with similar meanings across la...

We report the results of an experiment investigating the ramifications of using space to express coreference in American Sign Language (ASL). Nominals in ASL can be associated with locations in signing space, and pronouns are directed toward those locations to convey coreference. A probe recognition technique was used to investigate the case of "locus doubling" in which a single referent is ass...

This paper examines the automatic and strategic use of gender information in pronominal processing. Experiments 1 and 2 used short sentences where a pronoun was preceded by two potential antecedents. Results showed that even when adult readers did not use pronominal gender to strategically accelerate pronominal resolution, they remained sensitive to a gender disagreement between the pronoun and...

The Idiap NLP Group has participated in both DiscoMT 2015 sub-tasks: pronounfocused translation and pronoun prediction. The system for the first sub-task combines two knowledge sources: grammatical constraints from the hypothesized coreference links, and candidate translations from an SMT decoder. The system for the second sub-task avoids hypothesizing a coreference link, and uses instead a lar...

Event anaphora resolution plays a critical role in discourse analysis. This paper proposes a tree kernel-based framework for event pronoun resolution. In particular, a new tree expansion scheme is introduced to automatically determine a proper parse tree structure for event pronoun resolution by considering various kinds of competitive information related with the anaphor and the antecedent can...

In a language that allows null pronouns, why would a speaker bother to use an overt pronoun at all? A traditional answer is that an overt pronoun contains agreement information necessary for the identification of its antecedent. But this cannot possibly be the answer in languages like Turkish, which has subject-verb agreement, but no gender; since the verb already indicates the person and numbe...