Abstract
We report a study of referential choice in discourse production, understood as the choice between various types of referential devices, such as pronouns and full noun phrases. Our goal is to predict referential choice, and to explore to what extent such prediction is possible. Our approach to referential choice includes a cognitively informed theoretical component, corpus analysis, machine learning methods and experimentation with human participants. Machine learning algorithms make use of 25 factors, including referent’s properties (such as animacy and protagonism), the distance between a referential expression and its antecedent, the antecedent’s syntactic role, and so on. Having found the predictions of our algorithm to coincide with the original almost 90% of the time, we hypothesized that fully accurate prediction is not possible because, in many situations, more than one referential option is available. This hypothesis was supported by an experimental study, in which participants answered questions about either the original text in the corpus, or about a text modified in accordance with the algorithm’s prediction. Proportions of correct answers to these questions, as well as participants’ rating of the questions’ difficulty, suggested that divergences between the algorithm’s prediction and the original referential device in the corpus occur overwhelmingly in situations where the referential choice is not categorical.
Highlights
As we speak or write, we constantly mention various entities, or referents
An important question arises: if we continue improving our annotation and tuning up the modeling procedure, can referential choice be predicted with the accuracy approaching 100%? In other words, is the 10% difference between the algorithm’s prediction and the original texts due to certain shortcomings of our methods or to some more fundamental causes? We propose that complete accuracy may not be attainable due to the nature of the process of referential choice
Baseline C4.5 Decision tree algorithm Logistic regression Bagging Boosting only a pronoun or only a full noun phrase is appropriate, but there are numerous instances in which more than one referential option can be used. This issue was explored in Kibrik (1999, p. 39), and the basic referential choice was represented as a scale comprising five potential situations: (3) i. full NP only ii. full NP, ?pronoun iii. either full NP or pronoun iv. pronoun, ?full NP v. pronoun only
Summary
As we speak or write, we constantly mention various entities, or referents. The process of mentioning referents is conventionally called reference. When the speaker’s/writer’s decision to mention a referent is in place, another discourse phenomenon becomes relevant: referential choice that is the process of choosing an appropriate linguistic expression for the referent in question. The approach to referential choice adopted in the present study relies on earlier work by Chafe (1976, 1994), Givón (1983), Fox (1987), Tomlin (1987), Ariel (1990), and Gundel et al (1993) These and other theoretical approaches assumed some kind of a cognitive characterization of a referent that underlies referential choice, such as givenness, topicality, focusing, accessibility, salience, prominence, etc. Reference and referential choice, as linguistic manifestations of attention and activation, are related but distinct processes (see Kibrik, 2011, Chap. 10)
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