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

Burn all your textbooks

The standard propositional exposition of necessary and sufficient conditions, as available in introductory logic texts, leads to a contradiction. It should be abolished

Burn all your textbooks

The standard propositional exposition of necessary and sufficient conditions, as available in introductory logic texts, leads to a contradiction. It should be abolished

Context and the indexical 'I'

John Perry argued that the clearest case of an indexical that relies only on the narrow context is 'I,' whose designation depends on the agent and nothing else. In this presentation, I give some examples which show that this view, while essentially correct, may have problems in some rare divergent cases

Identity

In logic, the law (or principle) of identity states simply: 'A is A'. This article gives a concise account of identity

On an alleged problem with Stalnaker’s representation of context

We consider an objection of Hans Kamp (based on an example by Barbara Partee) to Robert Stalnaker's model of context