2,548 research outputs found
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 âitâ,
âthisâ, and âthatâ, as well as demonstrative noun phrases headed by âlabel nounsâ,
such as âthis eventâ, âthat issueâ, 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 âtranslation mismatchesâ, 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
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 (âattritersâ), a second group of attriters exposed exclusively to Spanish before they were tested (âre-exposedâ), 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 speakersâ L1 knowledge representations
A Logic-based Approach for Recognizing Textual Entailment Supported by Ontological Background Knowledge
We present the architecture and the evaluation of a new system for
recognizing textual entailment (RTE). In RTE we want to identify automatically
the type of a logical relation between two input texts. In particular, we are
interested in proving the existence of an entailment between them. We conceive
our system as a modular environment allowing for a high-coverage syntactic and
semantic text analysis combined with logical inference. For the syntactic and
semantic analysis we combine a deep semantic analysis with a shallow one
supported by statistical models in order to increase the quality and the
accuracy of results. For RTE we use logical inference of first-order employing
model-theoretic techniques and automated reasoning tools. The inference is
supported with problem-relevant background knowledge extracted automatically
and on demand from external sources like, e.g., WordNet, YAGO, and OpenCyc, or
other, more experimental sources with, e.g., manually defined presupposition
resolutions, or with axiomatized general and common sense knowledge. The
results show that fine-grained and consistent knowledge coming from diverse
sources is a necessary condition determining the correctness and traceability
of results.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figure
Coreference chains in Czech, English and Russian: Preliminary findings
Tento ÄlĂĄnek je pilotnĂ srovnavacĂ vĂ˝zkum koreferenÄnĂch ĹetÄzcĹŻ v ÄeĹĄtinÄ, angliÄtinÄ a ruĹĄtinÄ. Podrobili jsme analĂ˝ze 16 srovnatelnĂ˝ch textĹŻ ve tĹech jazycĂch. NaĹĄĂ motivacĂ bylo zjistit lingvistickou strukturu koreferenÄnĂch ĹetÄzcĹŻ v tÄchto jazycĂch a urÄit, kterĂŠ faktory ovlivĹujĂ tuto strukturu
Crossroads between contrastive linguistics, translation studies and machine translation
Contrastive Linguistics (CL), Translation Studies (TS) and Machine Translation (MT) have common grounds: They all work at the crossroad where two or more languages meet. Despite their inherent relatedness, methodological exchange between the three disciplines is rare. This special issue touches upon areas where the three fields converge. It results directly from a workshop at the 2011 German Association for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics (GSCL) conference in Hamburg where researchers from the three fields presented and discussed their interdisciplinary work. While the studies contained in this volume draw from a wide variety of objectives and methods, and various areas of overlaps between CL, TS and MT are addressed, the volume is by no means exhaustive with regard to this topic. Further cross-fertilisation is not only desirable, but almost mandatory in order to tackle future tasks and endeavours, and this volume is committed to bringing these three fields even closer together
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
Cross-lingual Incongruences in the Annotation of Coreference
In the present paper, we deal with incongruences in English-German multilingual coreference annotation and present automated methods to discover them. More specifically, we automatically detect full coreference chains in parallel texts and analyse discrepancies in their annotations. In doing so, we wish to find out whether the discrepancies rather derive from language typological constraints, from the translation or the actual annotation process. The results of our study contribute to the referential analysis of similarities and differences across languages and support evaluation of cross-lingual coreference annotation. They are also useful for cross-lingual coreference resolution systems and contrastive linguistic studies
Linguistic Structure in Statistical Machine Translation
This thesis investigates the influence of linguistic structure in statistical machine translation. We develop a word reordering model based on syntactic parse trees and address the issues of pronouns and morphological agreement with a source discriminative word lexicon predicting the translation for individual words using structural features. When used in phrase-based machine translation, the models improve the translation for language pairs with different word order and morphological variation
Discourse structure and information structure : interfaces and prosodic realization
In this paper we review the current state of research on the issue of discourse structure (DS) / information structure (IS) interface. This field has received a lot of attention from discourse semanticists and pragmatists, and has made substantial progress in recent years. In this paper we summarize the relevant studies. In addition, we look at the issue of DS/ISinteraction at a different levelâthat of phonetics. It is known that both information structure and discourse structure can be realized prosodically, but the issue of phonetic interaction between the prosodic devices they employ has hardly ever been discussed in this context. We think that a proper consideration of this aspect of DS/IS-interaction would enrich our understanding of the phenomenon, and hence we formulate some related research-programmatic positions
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