3,521 research outputs found
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
PERFORMING ANAPHORA IN MODERN GREEK: A NEO-GRICEAN PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS
The paper addresses the problem of interpreting anaphoric NPs in Modern Greek. It includes a proposal of a novel analysis based on the systematic interaction of the neo- Gricean pragmatic principles of communication, which provides a neat and elegant approach to NP-anaphora resolution. The findings of this study provide evidence for an account of NP-anaphora in terms of the division of labour between syntax and pragmatics and more accurately in terms of the systematic interaction of the neo-Gricean pragmatic principles
Focusing for Pronoun Resolution in English Discourse: An Implementation
Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural
language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution
of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon
like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and
devised several algorithms to resolve definite anaphora including pronouns. She
presented her theory in a computational framework but did not generally
implement the algorithms. Her algorithms related to focusing and pronoun
resolution are implemented in this thesis. This implementation provides a
better comprehension of the theory both from a conceptual and a computational
point of view. The resulting program is tested on different discourse segments,
and evaluation and analysis of the experiments are presented together with the
statistical results.Comment: iii + 49 pages, compressed, uuencoded Postscript file; revised
version of the first author's Bilkent M.S. thesis, written under the
supervision of the second author; notify Akman via e-mail
([email protected]) or fax (+90-312-266-4126) if you are unable to
obtain hardcopy, he'll work out somethin
Vagueness and referential ambiguity in a large-scale annotated corpus
In this paper, we argue that difficulties in the definition of coreference itself contribute to lower inter-annotator agreement in certain cases. Data from a large referentially annotated corpus serves to corroborate this point, using a quantitative investigation to assess which effects or problems are likely to be the most prominent. Several examples where such problems occur are discussed in more detail, and we then propose a generalisation of Poesio, Reyle and Stevensonās Justified Sloppiness Hypothesis to provide a unified model for these cases of disagreement and argue that a deeper understanding of the phenomena involved allows to tackle problematic cases in a more principled fashion than would be possible using only pre-theoretic intuitions
Non-situational functions of demonstrative noun phrases in Lingala (Bantu)
This paper examines the non-situational (i.e., non-exophoric) pragmatic functions of the three adnominal demonstratives, oyo, wand, and yango in the Bantu language Lingala. An examination of natural language corpora reveals that, although native-speaker intuitions sanction the use of oyo as an anaphor in demonstrative NPs, this demonstrative is hardly ever used in that role. It also reveals that wand, which has both situational and discourse-referential capacities, is used more frequently than the exclusively anaphoric demonstrative yango. It is explained that wand appears in a wide range of non-coreferential expression types, in coreferential expression types involving low-salience referents, and in coreferential expression types that both involve highly salient referents and include the speaker's desire to signal a shift in the mental representation of the referent towards a pejorative reading. The use of yango, on the other hand, is only licensed in cases of coreferentiality involving highly salient referents and implying continuation of the same mental representation of the referent. A specific section is devoted to charting the possible grammaticalization paths followed by the demonstratives. Conclusions are drawn for pragmatic theory formation in terms of the relation between form (yango vs. wand) and function (coreferentiality vs. non-coreferentiality)
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