Correspondences between Czech and English Coreferential Expressions

Abstract

In this work, we present a comprehensive study on correspondences between certain classes of coreferential expressions in English and Czech. We focus on central pronouns, relative pronouns, and anaphoric zeros. We designed an alignment-refining algorithm for English personal and possessive pronouns and Czech relative pronouns that improves the quality of alignment links not only for the classes it aimed at but also in general. Moreover, the instances of anaphoric expressions we focus on were manually annotated with their alignment counterparts, which served as a basis for this empirical study. The collected statistics of correspondences are contrasted with theoretical assumptions regarding the use of anaphoric means in the languages under analysis, such as pro-drop properties, the use of finite and non-finite constructions, etc. Finally, we present the ways how the observed correspondences can be exploited in cross-lingual coreference resolution.