Abstract pronominal anaphors and label nouns in German and English: Selected case studies and quantitative investigations

Abstract anaphors refer to abstract referents, such as facts or events. This paper presents a corpus-based comparative study of German and English abstract anaphors. Parallel bi-directional texts from the Europarl Corpus were annotated with functional and morpho-syntactic information, focusing on the pronouns ‘it’, ‘this’, and ‘that’, as well as demonstrative noun phrases headed by “label nouns”, such as ‘this event’, ‘that issue’, etc., and their German counterparts. We induce information about the cross-linguistic realization of abstract anaphors from the parallel texts. The contrastive findings are then controlled for translation-specific characteristics by examination of the differences between the original text and the translated text in each of the languages. In selected case studies, we investigate in detail “translation mismatches”, including changes in grammatical category (from pronouns to full noun phrases, and vice versa), grammatical function, or clausal position, addition or omission of modifying adjectives, changes in the lexical realization of head nouns, and transpositions of the demonstrative determiner. In some of these cases, the specificity of the abstract noun phrase is altered by the translation process

Reconstruction in German relative clauses : in favor of the matching analysis

In this paper I argue in favor of a Matching Analysis for German relative clauses. The Head Raising Analysis is shown to fail to account for parts of the reconstruction pattern in German, especially cases where only the external head is interpreted and the absence of Principle C effects. I propose a Matching Analysis with Vehicle Change and make consistent assumptions about possible deletion operations in relatives so that the entire pattern can be captured by one analysis which therefore proves superior to previous ones

Hungarian Gyerekestül versus Gyerekkel (‘with [the] kid’)

The paper analyzes the various uses of the Hungarian -stUl (‘together with’, ‘along with’) sociative (associative) suffix (later in the paper referred to simply as “sociative”), as in the example gyerekestül. As opposed to its comitative-instrumental suffix -vAl (‘with’), the - stUl suffix cannot express instrumentality. The paper aims to demonstrate the difference in use between the comitative-instrumental -vAl and the -stUl suffix in contemporary Hungarian, and to illuminate the historical emergence of the suffix as well as its grammatical status. It is argued on the basis of Antal (1960) and Kiefer (2003) that -stUl cannot be analyzed as an inflectional case suffix (such as the -vAl suffix, or -ed, -ing, or the plural in English), but should rather be categorized as a derivational suffix (such as English dis-, re-, in-, -ance, - able, -ish, -like, etc.). The paper also tries to shed light on the hypothetical cognitive psychological distinction between the comitative and the sociative. It is suggested that the sociative is based on the amalgam image schema which is derived from the LINK schema of the comitative. The ironical reading of the sociative is an implicature in the sense of Grice (1989) and Sperber and Wilson (1987). Psycholinguistic experimentation is proposed to follow up on the mental representation of the sociative

A Mention-Ranking Model for Abstract Anaphora Resolution

Resolving abstract anaphora is an important, but difficult task for text understanding. Yet, with recent advances in representation learning this task becomes a more tangible aim. A central property of abstract anaphora is that it establishes a relation between the anaphor embedded in the anaphoric sentence and its (typically non-nominal) antecedent. We propose a mention-ranking model that learns how abstract anaphors relate to their antecedents with an LSTM-Siamese Net. We overcome the lack of training data by generating artificial anaphoric sentence--antecedent pairs. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art results on shell noun resolution. We also report first benchmark results on an abstract anaphora subset of the ARRAU corpus. This corpus presents a greater challenge due to a mixture of nominal and pronominal anaphors and a greater range of confounders. We found model variants that outperform the baselines for nominal anaphors, without training on individual anaphor data, but still lag behind for pronominal anaphors. Our model selects syntactically plausible candidates and -- if disregarding syntax -- discriminates candidates using deeper features.Comment: In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Copenhagen, Denmar

Reference resolution in multi-modal interaction: Preliminary observations

In this paper we present our research on multimodal interaction in and with virtual environments. The aim of this presentation is to emphasize the necessity to spend more research on reference resolution in multimodal contexts. In multi-modal interaction the human conversational partner can apply more than one modality in conveying his or her message to the environment in which a computer detects and interprets signals from different modalities. We show some naturally arising problems but do not give general solutions. Rather we decide to perform more detailed research on reference resolution in uni-modal contexts to obtain methods generalizable to multi-modal contexts. Since we try to build applications for a Dutch audience and since hardly any research has been done on reference resolution for Dutch, we give results on the resolution of anaphoric and deictic references in Dutch texts. We hope to be able to extend these results to our multimodal contexts later

Discourse deixis and null anaphora in German

The main aim of this thesis is to provide insight into the interaction of the syntactic and pragmatic properties of German, particularly with respect to the issue of configurationality. This language is particularly difficult to classify as it displays both subject-object asymmetries (a feature of "configurational" languages), but also has a topic position (a feature of "discourse-configurational" languages). In order to avoid the difficulties associated with subtle acceptability judgements from informants, the study presented here is based on a frequency analysis of word order variation in spoken language corpora. In the first part, I concentrate on the initial position in German main clauses, which is traditionally referred to as the topic position, and using a task-oriented corpus provide the statistics for the following: ffl The frequency of the different grammatical functions in initial position, in order to determine the relative frequency of the canonical SVO word order. ffl ..

Anaphor resolution and the scope of syntactic constraints

An anaphor resolution algorithm is presented which relies on a combination of strategies for narrowing down and selecting from antecedent sets for re exive pronouns, nonre exive pronouns, and common nouns. The work focuses on syntactic restrictions which are derived from Chomsky's Binding Theory. It is discussed how these constraints can be incorporated adequately in an anaphor resolution algorithm. Moreover, by showing that pragmatic inferences may be necessary, the limits of syntactic restrictions are elucidated

Tentative Reference Acts? ‘Recognitional Demonstratives’ as Means of Suggesting Mutual Knowledge – or Overriding a Lack of It

In an explorative study on German oral corpus data we investigate recognitional use of proximal demonstratives as a means of explicit speaker-hearer interaction shaping the discourse structure. We show that recognitionals mark tentative reference acts in that speakers suggest - or pretend - mutual knowledge of the referent, at the same time appealing to the hearers to accept the reference. Hearers may tacitly or explicitly accept the referential act or deny it asking for clarification, in the latter case making speakers change the intended local discourse topic. On these grounds we argue against a differentiation between recognitional and indefinite demonstratives, subsuming both as kinds of recognitional use under ‘pretended’ cognitive proximity

Anaphora and Discourse Structure

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics, and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by adverbial connectives can interact with that associated with discourse structure. We conclude by sketching out a lexicalised grammar for discourse that facilitates discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor resolution and inference.Comment: 45 pages, 17 figures. Revised resubmission to Computational Linguistic