5,125 research outputs found
Testing the Limits of Anaphoric Distance in Classical Arabic: a Corpus-Based Study
One of the central aims in research on anaphora is to discover the factors that determine the choice of referential expressions in discourse. Ariel (1988; 2001) offers an Accessibility Scale where referential expressions, including demonstratives, are categorized according to the values of anaphoric (i.e. textual) distance that each of these has in relation to its antecedent. The aim of this paper is to test Arielâs (1988; 1990; 2001) claim that the choice to use proximal or distal anaphors is mainly determined by anaphoric distance. This claim is investigated in relation to singular demonstratives in a corpus of Classical Arabic (CA) prose texts by using word count to measure anaphoric distance. Results indicate that anaphoric distance cannot be taken as a consistent or reliable determinant of how anaphors are used in CA, and so Arielâs claim is not supported by the results of this study. This also indicates that the universality of anaphoric distance, as a criterion of accessibility, is defied
Dependent Types for Pragmatics
This paper proposes the use of dependent types for pragmatic phenomena such
as pronoun binding and presupposition resolution as a type-theoretic
alternative to formalisms such as Discourse Representation Theory and Dynamic
Semantics.Comment: This version updates the paper for publication in LEU
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
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
Automatic case acquisition from texts for process-oriented case-based reasoning
This paper introduces a method for the automatic acquisition of a rich case
representation from free text for process-oriented case-based reasoning. Case
engineering is among the most complicated and costly tasks in implementing a
case-based reasoning system. This is especially so for process-oriented
case-based reasoning, where more expressive case representations are generally
used and, in our opinion, actually required for satisfactory case adaptation.
In this context, the ability to acquire cases automatically from procedural
texts is a major step forward in order to reason on processes. We therefore
detail a methodology that makes case acquisition from processes described as
free text possible, with special attention given to assembly instruction texts.
This methodology extends the techniques we used to extract actions from cooking
recipes. We argue that techniques taken from natural language processing are
required for this task, and that they give satisfactory results. An evaluation
based on our implemented prototype extracting workflows from recipe texts is
provided.Comment: Sous presse, publication pr\'evue en 201
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