Temporal Relations: Reference or Discourse Coherence?

The temporal relations that hold between events described by successive utterances are often left implicit or underspecified. We address the role of two phenomena with respect to the recovery of these relations: (1) the referential properties of tense, and (2) the role of temporal constraints imposed by coherence relations. We account for several facets of the identification of temporal relations through an integration of these.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of ACL-94, Student Session. 5 pages, LaTeX source, requires lingmacros. Comments are welcom

Anaphoric dependencies in ellipsis

Engineering and Applied Science

Implicit Causality Biases Influence Relative Clause Attachment

•  Do comprehenders bring expectations from the discourse level to bear on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity? •  Do these expectations impact online processing? Problem: As comprehenders combine words to form a sentence, they must also combine clauses and sentences to form a coherent discourse. Is the resolution of local syntactic ambiguity sensitive to the process of inferring a coherent discourse? Proposal: Bring together 3 observations about the pragmatic functions of relative clauses (RCs) and the biases associated with implicit causality (IC) verbs, and test whether these types of factors influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity in relative clause attachment: (i) John detests/babysits the children of the musician who… Results: An off-line sentence-completion study and an on-line self-paced reading study examined comprehenders ' expectations for high/low RC attachments following IC and non-IC verbs. In both studies, IC verbs shifted readers ' attachment preferences from low to high. In the completion study, most high-attaching RCs following IC verbs encoded explanations of the matrix-clause event. These results suggest that comprehenders use pragmatic cues mid-sentence t

Pronominalization and expectations for re-mention:Modeling coreference in contexts with three referents

The relationship between pronoun production and pronoun interpretation has been proposed to follow Bayesian principles, combining a comprehender’s expectation about which referent will be mentioned next and their estimate of how likely it is that a potential referent will be re-mentioned using a pronoun. The Bayesian Model has received support from studies in several languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Catalan, German), but tested contexts have been limited to two event participants, whereas natural language discourse often involves contexts with more than two event participants. In this study, we conducted three story continuation experiments to assess how the Bayesian Model performs in more complex contexts. Our results show that even in contexts with three event participants, comprehenders can behave rationally when interpreting pronouns, but that they appear to require sufficient context to build up a coherent representation of the situation to do so. In addition to testing the basic claim of the Bayesian Model (Weak Bayes), we test the central prediction of the Strong form of the hypothesis: that the two components of the model (next-mention expectations and choice of referring expression) are influenced by dissociated sets of factors. In a model comparison, Experiments 2 and 3 confirm the closest fit from the Bayesian Model, which supports Weak Bayes, and none of our experiments find evidence that the predictability of a referent affects pronominalization rates, which corroborates Strong Bayes. Finally, we test whether the rate of pronominalization is sensitive to factors related to ambiguity and argument/adjunct status of referents; we find that participants vary their production of pronouns most strongly based on the grammatical role of the antecedent (subject or not), with a smaller effect from the presence/absence of a gender-matched competitor and no effect from the syntactic position of this competing referent