Resolving anaphoric references on deficient syntactic descriptions

Syntactic coindexing restrictions are by now known to be of central importance to practical anaphor resolution approaches. Since, in particular due to structural ambiguity, the assumption of the availability of a unique syntactic reading proves to be unrealistic, robust anaphor resolution relies on techniques to overcome this deficiency. In this paper, two approaches are presented which generalize the verification of coindexing constraints to de cient descriptions. At first, a partly heuristic method is described, which has been implemented. Secondly, a provable complete method is specified. It provides the means to exploit the results of anaphor resolution for a further structural disambiguation. By rendering possible a parallel processing model, this method exhibits, in a general sense, a higher degree of robustness. As a practically optimal solution, a combination of the two approaches is suggested

What is the source of L1 attrition? The effect of recent L1 re-exposure on Spanish speakers under L1 attrition

The recent hypothesis that L1 attrition affects the ability to process interface structures but not knowledge representations (Sorace, 2011) is tested by investigating the effects of recent L1 re-exposure on antecedent preferences for Spanish pronominal subjects, using offline judgements and online eye-tracking measures. Participants included a group of native Spanish speakers experiencing L1 attrition (‘attriters’), a second group of attriters exposed exclusively to Spanish before they were tested (‘re-exposed’), and a control group of Spanish monolinguals. The judgement data shows no significant differences between the groups. Moreover, the monolingual and re-exposed groups are not significantly different from each other in the eye-tracking data. The results of this novel manipulation indicate that attrition effects decrease due to L1 re-exposure, and that bilinguals are sensitive to input changes. Taken together, the findings suggest that attrition affects online sensitivity with interface structures rather than causing a permanent change in speakers’ L1 knowledge representations

Lexical patterns, features and knowledge resources for coreference resolution in clinical notes

Generation of entity coreference chains provides a means to extract linked narrative events from clinical notes, but despite being a well-researched topic in natural language processing, general- purpose coreference tools perform poorly on clinical texts. This paper presents a knowledge-centric and pattern-based approach to resolving coreference across a wide variety of clinical records comprising discharge summaries, progress notes, pathology, radiology and surgical reports from two corpora (Ontology Development and Information Extraction (ODIE) and i2b2/VA). In addition, a method for generating coreference chains using progressively pruned linked lists is demonstrated that reduces the search space and facilitates evaluation by a number of metrics. Independent evaluation results show an F-measure for each corpus of 79.2% and 87.5%, respectively, which offers performance at least as good as human annotators, greatly increased performance over general- purpose tools, and improvement on previously reported clinical coreference systems. The system uses a number of open-source components that are available to download

The resolution of case conflicts : a pilot study

This paper reports the results of a pilot study on the resolution of case conflicts in German free relative constructions. Section 1 gives a brief introduction into the phenomenon, section 2 presents the experiment and its results, section 3 ends the paper with a brief more general discussion

Null and overt subject biases in Spanish and Italian: a cross-linguistic comparison

Over the last twenty years a great deal of linguistic research has investigated how anaphoric expressions retrieve their antecedents in the discourse showing that a variety of pragmatic factors together with grammatical and cognitive constraints contribute in determining the distribution of different types of expressions. A particularly interesting case for the study of such phenomena is that of Null Subjec

Beyond gender stereotypes in language comprehension: self sex-role descriptions affect the brain’s potentials associated with agreement processing

We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as “king” or “engineer”) or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female). When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a P600 effect reflecting a failure in the agreement process. When instead the gender violation occurred after stereotypical role-nouns the Event Related Potential response was biphasic, being positive in parietal electrodes and negative in anterior left electrodes. The use of a correlational approach showed that those participants with more “feminine” or “expressive” self sex-role descriptions showed a P600 response for stereotype violations, suggesting that they experienced the mismatch as an agreement violation; whereas less “expressive” participants showed an Nref effect, indicating more effort spent in linking the pronouns with the possible, although less likely, counter-stereotypical referent

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