Interpretation Of Anaphora Research Articles

Assessing anaphoric relations via the phased choice methodology

AbstractThere has been a continued interest in discovering how learners of another language acquire a target language’s anaphoric system. While our understanding of the issues has improved, the development of methodologies to assess the interpretation of anaphora in a learner’s interlanguage has not. This paper is concerned with introducing a methodology named ‘Phased Choice’ to assess anaphoric reference, which more effectively tackles the issues facing anaphoric testing. The data was gathered from an experiment that focused on English and Korean learners of Chinese acquiring the Chinese reflexive ziji ‘self’, results showing that the Korean learners are at an advantage to their English counterparts due to the similar pragmatic strategies Korean and Chinese share. Moreover, the methodology in comparison to the literature shows its strength, dealing effectively with problems past tests faced.

Tracking reference with null subjects

Null-subject languages are said to track reference and discourse-pragmatic information exploiting the array of specialized forms provided by their grammar. This argument is normally used as the baseline against which language acquisition and contact varieties (L1, 2L1, L2, L1-attrition) are evaluated. However, recent studies on Italian question the empirical validity of this pattern and call for an analysis of these issues from an empirical perspective. This paper presents the results of a study on mechanisms for introduction and tracking of reference in narratives (Frog Stories) in Italian L1/Dutch L2, Dutch L1/Italian L2, Italian/Dutch bilinguals and age-matched monolingual Italian controls. All utterances were scrutinized for form, antecedent, and discourse-pragmatic function. The results so far show an overextended use of null subjects, also in contexts of topic-shift, where overt subjects would be expected. These constructions are not ambiguous, as speakers make use of alternative devices for anaphora interpretation that exploit contextual cues.

The Production and Interpretation of Anaphora and Ellipsis

AbstractThe paper tries to apply a psychological theory of language production and interpretation to the linguistic description of pronouns. The claim is that this is possible and helpful and that a full theory of the use and interpretation of pronouns is possible from this perspective, i.e.one that can both predict when pronouns are used and what is their antecedent. In particular, the theory should be able to explain the properties of pronoun resolution, pronoun selection in natural language generation and the grammaticalisation processes that lead to pronouns. The psychological theory proposed is motivated as an account of parity: the probable identity between the speaker intention and the hearer interpretation. It has four components: a minimal account of legal forms for a given input, speaker self-monitoring for a prioritised set of features, cue-based understanding and filtering by production. A good form for an intention is legal and marks the most prioritised features best, a good interpretation meets the production filter and is most strongly cued by the signal. Descriptively, the main component of self-monitoring for pronouns is an extension of the referential hierarchy (Gundel et al., 1993). Recency, frequency and relevance are effects of cue-based interpretation and central to pronoun resolution. The role of syntax is limited to the agreement features and subclassification of pronouns. The aim of the paper is not to contribute to pronoun resolution or generation but to explore the descriptive potential of a psychologically inspired account of parity in linguistic communication, with of course the hope that the understanding of pronouns benefits from this exercise.

Book Review

Books ReviewedA. Garnham, Mental Models and the Interpretation of Anaphora

Introduction to the Special Issue on Computational Anaphora Resolution

Anaphora accounts for cohesion in texts and is a phenomenon under active study in formal and computational linguistics alike. The correct interpretation of anaphora is vital for natural language processing (NLP). For example, anaphora resolution is a key task in natural language interfaces, machine translation, text summarization, information extraction, question answering, and a number of other NLP applications. After considerable initial research, followed by years of relative silence in the early 1980s, anaphora resolution has attracted the attention of many researchers in the last 10 years and a great deal of successful work on the topic has been carried out. Discourseoriented theories and formalisms such as Discourse Representation Theory and Centering Theory inspired new research on the computational treatment of anaphora. The drive toward corpus-based robust NLP solutions further stimulated interest in alternative and/or data-enriched approaches. Last, but not least, application-driven research in areas such as automatic abstracting and information extraction independently highlighted the importance of anaphora and coreference resolution, boosting research in this area. Much of the earlier work in anaphora resolution heavily exploited domain and linguistic knowledge (Sidner 1979; Carter 1987; Rich and LuperFoy 1988; Carbonell and Brown 1988), which was difficult both to represent and to process, and which required considerable human input. However, the pressing need for the development of robust and inexpensive solutions to meet the demands of practical NLP systems encouraged many researchers to move away from extensive domain and linguistic knowledge and to embark instead upon knowledge-poor anaphora resolution strategies. A number of proposals in the 1990s deliberately limited the extent to which they relied on domain and/or linguistic knowledge and reported promising results in knowledge-poor operational environments (Dagan and Itai 1990, 1991; Lappin and Leass 1994; Nasukawa 1994; Kennedy and Boguraev 1996; Williams, Harvey, and Preston 1996; Baldwin 1997; Mitkov 1996, 1998b). The drive toward knowledge-poor and robust approaches was further motivated by the emergence of cheaper and more reliable corpus-based NLP tools such as partof-speech taggers and shallow parsers, alongside the increasing availability of corpora and other NLP resources (e.g., ontologies). In fact, the availability of corpora, both raw and annotated with coreferential links, provided a strong impetus to anaphora resolu

Anaphora interpretations in Spanish utterances and the neo-Gricean pragmatic theory

Levinson (1987a,b, 1991) advocates using a set of revised Gricean maxims to account for preferred interpretations of zeros, pronouns, and lexical NPs. This study tests the viability of one of Levinson's (1987a,b) neo-Gricean principles and predictions arising from this principle with regard to the interpretation of non-clitic reflexives versus pronouns when used in the same linguistic environment in Spanish utterances. Also, following Huang's (1991, 1994) observation that pragmatic inferences must be in keeping with semantic and pragmatic ‘consistency constraints’, it was hypothesized that anaphora interpretations in Spanish would be constrained by antecedent salience, background knowledge, and semantic constraints, as well as grammatical constraint including c-command and agreement, and that these constraints could override implicatures of coreference and disjoint reference predicted by Levinson. An oral comprehension test for anaphora interpretations in Spanish utterances was administered to 105 native speakers. Results reveal that hearers abide by several of Levinson's neo-Gricean sub-maxims. However, Levinson's prediction of a contrast in reference from the use of a pronoun versus a reflexive in the same environment was often overridden by the consistency constraints. These findings suggest that consistency constraints on implicatures play a greater role in anaphora interpretation than Levinson's model had predicted.

Sound-form non-insertion and the direction of ellipsis

The paper investigates cases of coordinate ellipsis in Hungarian, fromthe perspective of possible differences between forward and backward ellipsis,and argues that all instances of backward ellipsis (BWE), as well as mosttypes of forward ellipsis (FWE), arise by the non-insertion of phonologicalshapes to the terminal nodes of syntactic phrase markers at the level of morphology,where vocabulary insertion takes place in a standard version of late insertiontheories: Distributed Morphology. It is shown, on the one hand, that evenin those cases of FWE where considerable lexical differences occur betweenthe ellipsis site and its parallel licensing antecedent, the device of non-insertionis often sucifient for a satisfactory account, thereby limiting the scopeof applying other, less easily constrained devices, such as anaphora interpretation,or reconstruction. On the other hand, BWE need not be analysed as the resultof a separate operation (PF deletion), either, as non-insertion has the sameeffects, and may bear the same restrictions.

Directionality preferences in the interpretation of anaphora: data from Korean and Japanese.

ABSTRACTRecent work by Lust and others has led to the prediction that children acquiring left-branching languages will exhibit a preference for backward patterns of anaphora. In this paper, we test this prediction against data from Korean and Japanese and show it to be false. An alternative hypothesis proposing a preference for forward patterns of anaphora is outlined and possible explanations for earlier experimental results supporting Lust's prediction are considered.