Dependent plural pronouns with Skolemized choice functions

The present paper discusses two interesting phenomena concerning phi-features on plural pronouns: (i) plural pronouns that denote atomic individuals (‘dependent plural pronouns’), and (ii) plural pronouns with more than one binder (‘partial binding’). A novel account of these two phenomena is proposed, according to which all occurrences of phi-features are both semantically and morphologically relevant. For such a ‘uniformly semantic account’ of phi-features, dependent plural pronouns constitute a theoretical challenge, while partial binding is more or less straightforwardly accounted for. In order to make sense of the semantic effects of the phi-features on dependent plural pronouns, the following idea is pursued: the phi-features on a dependent plural pronoun reflect the range of values that the pronoun takes, rather than the particular value it denotes at a time. This idea is implemented in a compositional semantics by making use of (Skolemized) choice functions. An appealing feature of the present account is that, unlike its predecessors, it accounts for dependent plural pronouns without c-commanding antecedents in essentially the same way as for those with c-commanding antecedents. It is also shown how this account of dependent plural pronouns can straightforwardly be augmented with set indices to account for partial binding

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

Natural Language and its Ontology

This paper gives a characterization of the ontology implicit in natural language and the entities it involves, situates natural language ontology within metaphysics, and responds to Chomskys' dismissal of externalist semantics

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 Stevenson’s 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

Generating plural NPs in discourse : evidence from the GNOME corpus

Research on the automatic generation of referring expressions has extended algorithms for the generation of full definite NPs to deal with anaphoric references. However, there has been relatively little work on the specific problems raised by plural anaphora. In particular, since plurals involve a reference to a set rather than an individual, one of the interesting questions concerns the extent to which elements of the set introduced by a plurality are salient, as compared to the plurality itself. This paper offers a preliminary exploration of these questions through a study of a small, richly annotated corpus. We discuss the implications of some of the findings for automatic referring expression generation, and also identify some fruitful avenues for future work.peer-reviewe

Dynamic Semantics

This article focuses on foundational issues in dynamic and static semantics, specifically on what is conceptually at stake between the dynamic framework and the truth-conditional framework, and consequently what kinds of evidence support each framework. The article examines two questions. First, it explores the consequences of taking the proposition as central semantic notion as characteristic of static semantics, and argues that this is not as limiting in accounting for discourse dynamics as many think. Specifically, it explores what it means for a static semantics to incorporate the notion of context change potential in a dynamic pragmatics and denies that this conception of static semantics requires that all updates to the context be eliminative and distributive. Second, it argues that the central difference between the two frameworks is whether semantics or pragmatics accounts for dynamics, and explores what this means for the oft-heard claim that dynamic semantics blurs the semantics/pragmatics distinction

Deixis Analysis on Joe Biden’s Speech “Remarks on Afghanistan”

In communication, a speaker sometime uses language features which to point or indicate objects, places, persons, times, and text passages in a specific context. This language features are called deixis or deictic expression. The aim of this study is to find out and describe what kind of deixis and reference used by Joe Biden in his speech. In conducting the study, the researcher conducts the descriptive qualitative method because the result and discussion of this study is presented in a word and descriptive form and focused on quality of the researcher’s interpretation. This study applied the classification of deixis by Stephen C. Levinson (1983). There are 203 words of person deixis, 54 data of place deixis, 45 data of time deixis, 12 data of social deixis, and 31 data od discourse deixis. The result show that person deixis is mostly use by Joe Biden in his speech. This implies that the speech is considered as important so that the speaker express himself as the president as the center of the speech. The result show that the speech by Joe Biden is not only contains of deixis, but it also contains of reference. The result show that there are two types of reference in Joe Biden’s speech, namely Personal reference and demonstrative reference. This study also applied the theory of reference by Halliday and Hasan (1976). This implies that the speech is not only attract people to understand of what, who, when, and where the speaker means, but the speech is also considered as a text and meaningful