Pronominal types and abstract reference in the Danish and Italian DAD corpora

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Anaphora Resolution (WAR II). Editor: Christer Johansson. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 2 (2008), 63-71. © 2008 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/7129

CHR as grammar formalism. A first report

Grammars written as Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) can be executed as efficient and robust bottom-up parsers that provide a straightforward, non-backtracking treatment of ambiguity. Abduction with integrity constraints as well as other dynamic hypothesis generation techniques fit naturally into such grammars and are exemplified for anaphora resolution, coordination and text interpretation.Comment: 12 pages. Presented at ERCIM Workshop on Constraints, Prague, Czech Republic, June 18-20, 200

Topic-Continuity and Topic-Shift Effects in Spanish Discourse: A Comparative Analysis of Referring Expressions

Differences in use among referring expressions are usually explained on the basis of the cognitive accessibility of their antecedents, where antecedent accessibility has been operationalized differently in the literature; i.e. as a grammatical role, as syntactic prominence or as antecedent distance. On these grounds, it has been proposed that personal pronouns prefer topical antecedents whereas demonstratives prefer non-topical antecedents. This paper investigates the referring properties of Spanish demonstratives and direct object personal pronouns with the aim to unveil their differences and similarities. My analysis shows that these two expressions are very similar referentially when a narrow view of discourse context is considered. However, important differences show up when a broader notion of context is thrown into the picture; i.e. contexts that extend beyond the immediate previous sentence and beyond the immediate local topic of discourse. Based on my corpus evidence and on previous research on the pragmatic interpretation of referring expressions, I claim that direct object personal pronouns and demonstrative noun phrases crucially differ in the way they contribute to discourse coherence; the former playing the role of topic continuity markers and the latter focalising referents that reintroduce suspended or declining topics and marking (sub)-topic shifts in the discourse

Recent advances in Apertium, a free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform for low-resource languages

This paper presents an overview of Apertium, a free and open-source rule-based machine translation platform. Translation in Apertium happens through a pipeline of modular tools, and the platform continues to be improved as more language pairs are added. Several advances have been implemented since the last publication, including some new optional modules: a module that allows rules to process recursive structures at the structural transfer stage, a module that deals with contiguous and discontiguous multi-word expressions, and a module that resolves anaphora to aid translation. Also highlighted is the hybridisation of Apertium through statistical modules that augment the pipeline, and statistical methods that augment existing modules. This includes morphological disambiguation, weighted structural transfer, and lexical selection modules that learn from limited data. The paper also discusses how a platform like Apertium can be a critical part of access to language technology for so-called low-resource languages, which might be ignored or deemed unapproachable by popular corpus-based translation technologies. Finally, the paper presents some of the released and unreleased language pairs, concluding with a brief look at some supplementary Apertium tools that prove valuable to users as well as language developers. All Apertium-related code, including language data, is free/open-source and available at https://github.com/apertium

The Diachrony of Definiteness in North Germanic

This book is an account of the rise of definite and indefinite articles in Danish, Swedish and Icelandic, as documented in a choice of extant texts from 1200-1550. These three North Germanic languages show different development patterns in the rise of articles, despite the common origin, but each reveals interdependencies between the two processes. The matter is approached from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. The statistical analysis provides an improved overview on article grammaticalization, focusing on the factors at the basis of such process. The in-depth qualitative analysis of longer text passages places the crucial stage of the definite article grammaticalization with the so-called indirect anaphoric reference. Readership: All interested in historical linguistics and North Germanic languages, in particular those with interest in the rise of definite and indefinite articles; also linguists (including undergraduates) with interest in the category of definiteness and in corpus linguistics

Contents

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Anaphora Resolution (WAR II). Editor: Christer Johansson. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 2 (2008), v. © 2008 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/7129

Cross-lingual porting of distributional semantic classification

Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2009. Editors: Kristiina Jokinen and Eckhard Bick. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 4 (2009), 246-249. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9206

Discourse Deixis and Coreference: Evidence from AnCora

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Anaphora Resolution (WAR II). Editor: Christer Johansson. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 2 (2008), 73-82. © 2008 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/7129