Types Of Anaphors Research Articles

Anaphors in Ikwuano Igbo: Binding Theory Approach

This work investigates Anaphors in Ikwuano Igbo. Anaphoric expressions are useful in the meaningful interpretations of NPs in a discourse. This study adopts the Binding Theory (BT) approach of GB syntax in examining anaphoric expressions in Igbo. Data for this work were elicited from native speakers of Ikwuano in Ikwuano area of Abia State, Nigeria. This paper was verified for cross-referencing purposes given the researcher’s native speaking intuition and introspection. This study investigates anaphors and antecedents and also demonstrates the concepts of C-command and binding, among others in Ikwuano Igbo. The work reveals that Ikwuano Igbo has two types of anaphors- the reflexive and the reciprocal anaphors. The study demonstrates that the binding theory investigates the syntactic relationship that can or must hold between a given proform and its antecedent. In this respect, anaphors (reflexive and reciprocal pronouns) behave very differently from personal pronouns. The work demonstrates the concepts of binding, Co-indexation, Co-referentiality, locality constraint and C-constituent command to show dependency between the antecedents and the anaphors in Ikwuano Igbo. This paper also reveals that Ikwuano Igbo has anaphoric expressions that do not mark gender. The Binding Theory shows that the antecedent and the anaphor occur in the same governing category. Also it shows that a pronominal must be free in its governing category and an R-expression must be free everywhere in a sentence according to the regulating principles of the Theory. This paper reveals the descriptive nature of antecedent- anaphor relationship in the study of syntactic structures for grammaticality.

Anaphoric binding in Modern Standard Arabic: A phase-based analysis

AbstractThis article explores the distribution of Arabic reflexive and reciprocal anaphors in various structures as well as the syntactic environments in which such anaphors are (in)admissible. In particular, it examines the binding domains for reflexives and reciprocals and focuses for the most part on the asymmetries between these two types of anaphors in possessive DPs and PPs. It will be shown that the binding facts are better captured by reducing binding domains to phases, that DPs and PPs constitute a phase only when containing a possessive phrase, and that a reflexive and a reciprocal behave differently in such possessive structures in that the latter, unlike the former, undergoes overt movement. Accordingly, it will be argued that reflexive possessives are ungrammatical because they are left unbound in their DP/PP phase, while reciprocal possessives are grammatical since multiple copies of the distributor are created during the derivation due to movement, allowing it to seek an antecedent in the higher vP, its phasal binding domain. For this to hold, Principle A should apply cyclically at the end of each phase; that is, before the complement of the phase head is spelled out.

Importance of anaphora resolution in machine translation

In this era of continuously progressing Information Technology, information exchange is taking place in various domains at a faster pace. However, availability of huge information, diversity of knowledge sources and variations in structure of languages, leads to some hurdles in its effective utilization. Use of Machine Translation is a good enough solution at this stage, which can remove several constraints up-to some extent. Also, because of the easy and economic Internet accessibility, Machine Translation is becoming crucial. But several technical constraints are there in Machine Translation process that must be resolved for qualitative translation. Anaphora resolution is one of the major and complex problems of Machine Translation. Many researchers and research institute working in the field of language technology and translation are continuously striving to resolve the problem. Depending upon type of language there may be various classes of anaphor.Therefore, depending upon the type of source and target language, type of anaphor and anaphor resolution process also may differ. This paper is an attempt to go in detail and reviewing of currently available theoretical approaches and algorithms of anaphora resolution that are being used in various machine translation models.

CLASSIFICATION OF SHORT POSSESSIVE CLITIC PRONOUN NYA IN MALAY TEXT TO SUPPORT ANAPHOR CANDIDATE DETERMINATION

Anaphor candidate determination is an important process in anaphora resolution (AR) systems. There are several types of anaphor, one of which is pronominal anaphor. Pronominal anaphor is an anaphor that involves pronouns. In some of the cases, certain pronouns can be used without referring to any situation or entity in a text, and this phenomenon is known as pleonastic. In the case of the Malay language, it usually occurs for the pronoun nya. The pleonastic that exists in every text causes a severe problem to the anaphora resolution systems. The process to determine the pleonastic nya is not the same as identifying the pleonastic ‘it’ in the English language, where the syntactic pattern could not be used because the structure of nya comes at the end of a word. As an alternative, semantic classes are used to identify the pleonastic itself and the anaphoric nya. In this paper, the automatic semantic tag was used to determine the type of nya, which at the same time could determine nya as an anaphor candidate. The new algorithms and MalayAR architecture were proposed. The results of the F-measure showed the detection of clitic nya as a separate word achieved a perfect 100% result. In comparison, the clitic nya as a pleonastic achieved 88%, clitic nya referring to humans achieved 94%, and clitic nya referring to non-humans achieved 63%. The results showed that the proposed algorithms were acceptable to solve the issue of the clitic nya as pleonastic, human referral as well as non-human referral.

Understanding Reference: Morphological Marking in Japanese

This study investigates reference resolution with repeated-name anaphors in Japanese, particularly focusing on (i) subject anaphor with the nominative postposition ga, (ii) topic-subject anaphor with the topic postposition wa, (iii) scrambled object anaphor with the accusative postposition o, and (iv) topic-object anaphor with the topic postposition wa. A self-paced sentence-by-sentence reading experiment was conducted using two-sentence discourse items followed by comprehension questions, aiming to examine which type of anaphor would trigger a faster realization of the anaphor-antecedent relationship. The discourse items included antecedents in the first sentence and anaphors in the second sentences, and the comprehension questions asked about the antecedents in the first sentences. Results showed that the comprehension questions for the discourses that included topic anaphors (topic-subject-wa and topic-object-wa) were responded to faster than those for the discourses that included non-topic anaphors (subject-ga and scrambled object-o). The results indicate that anaphors’ topic-hood given by wa facilitates the realization of antecedents.

A categorical analysis of coreference resolution errors in biomedical texts

BackgroundCoreference resolution is an essential task in information extraction from the published biomedical literature. It supports the discovery of complex information by linking referring expressions such as pronouns and appositives to their referents, which are typically entities that play a central role in biomedical events. Correctly establishing these links allows detailed understanding of all the participants in events, and connecting events together through their shared participants. ResultsAs an initial step towards the development of a novel coreference resolution system for the biomedical domain, we have categorised the characteristics of coreference relations by type of anaphor as well as broader syntactic and semantic characteristics, and have compared the performance of a domain adaptation of a state-of-the-art general system to published results from domain-specific systems in terms of this categorisation. We also develop a rule-based system for anaphoric coreference resolution in the biomedical domain with simple modules derived from available systems. Our results show that the domain-specific systems outperform the general system overall. Whilst this result is unsurprising, our proposed categorisation enables a detailed quantitative analysis of the system performance. We identify limitations of each system and find that there remain important gaps in the state-of-the-art systems, which are clearly identifiable with respect to the categorisation. ConclusionWe have analysed in detail the performance of existing coreference resolution systems for the biomedical literature and have demonstrated that there clear gaps in their coverage. The approach developed in the general domain needs to be tailored for portability to the biomedical domain. The specific framework for class-based error analysis of existing systems that we propose has benefits for identifying specific limitations of those systems. This in turn provides insights for further system development.

Centering Theory, transitions and referent marking in the corpus of the written Serbian language

The aim of the paper is to map various types of anaphor to the centering transitions in the corpus of Serbian newspaper articles. Centering Theory (WALKER, JOSHI ET AL. 1998) is a theory of local coherence in which four types of transitions are used as parameters of coherence. As is hypothesized in the previous literature based on various languages, the CONTINUE transition is mostly characterized by a minimal form (a zero form of the topic), while the SMOOTH and ROUGH shifts are found with a full noun phrase topic. The analysis shows that the ?Ordering Rule? of Centering Theory is not fully followed in the written corpus of the Serbian language since SMOOTH SHIFT has been identified as a prevalent type of transition in the corpus. The following two reasons were identified for that: (1) the genre of the newspaper articles, and (2) the way clauses are combined within a complex sentence in the Serbian written corpus.

The interpretation of encapsulating anaphors in Spanish and their functions

Abstract Encapsulating anaphors differ from other types of anaphor by having one or more situations - not an entity - as its referent. The main aim of the article is to propose a hypothesis for how anaphoric encapsulation is resolved. The hypothesis builds on the cognitive linguistic theory of instructional semantics to suggest that anaphoric encapsulation provides instructions for the interpretive process, leading to the resolution of the anaphoric relation. A secondary aim is to illustrate various functions of this type of anaphor

A Centering Theory Analysis of Discrepancies on Subject Zero Anaphor in English to Thai Translation

Centering theory (CT) has been adopted in analyzing 84 zero anaphors in 50 informative texts. It is found that most zero anaphors occur in Continuation state both in English texts (source texts (ST)) and Thai translation (target texts (TT)). Zero anaphors in the TT outnumber those in ST and are found in more environments. In terms of translation, most zero anaphors in source texts remain in the same form in the target texts although some items are translated into different anaphor forms. Results indicate that zero anaphor is used to keep discourse coherence and to refer to the backward-looking center (Cb) of current utterances in both languages. Therefore, most zero anaphors in source texts are translated into zero anaphors in target texts when the CT transition state of utterances in source texts and target texts is Continuation, and are translated into other anaphors when the CT transition state in source texts is changed to another transition state in the target texts. Constraints in translation of zero anaphors can be explained in terms of anaphor interpretation, salience of entities, syntactic constraint, and naturalness of translation. However, this paper focuses only on one type of anaphor, namely subject zero anaphor; investigation of other types of anaphor will reveal other discrepancies in using and translating anaphors from this language pair.

Influences of grammatical and stereotypical gender during reading: eye movements in pronominal and noun phrase anaphor resolution

Two eye-tracking studies addressed the processing of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues in anaphor resolution in German. The authors investigated pronominal (er ‘he’/sie ‘she’) and noun phrase (dieser Mann ‘this man’/diese Frau ‘this woman’) anaphors in sentences containing stereotypical role nouns as antecedents (Example: Oft hatte der Elektriker gute Einfälle, regelmässig plante er/dieser Mann neue Projekte' Often had the electrician good ideas, regularly planned he/this man new projects'). Participants were native speakers of German (N=40 and N=24 in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). Results show that influences of grammatical gender occur in early stages of processing, whereas the influences of stereotypical gender appear only in later measures. Both effects, however, strongly depend on the type of anaphor. Furthermore, the results provide evidence for asymmetries in processing feminine and masculine grammatical gender and are discussed with reference to two-stage models of anaphor resolution.

Processing VP-ellipsis and VP-anaphora with structurally parallel and nonparallel antecedents: An eye-tracking study

In this paper, we report on an eye-tracking study investigating the processing of English VP-ellipsis (John took the rubbish out. Fred did [] too) (VPE) and VP-anaphora (John took the rubbish out. Fred did it too) (VPA) constructions, with syntactically parallel versus nonparallel antecedent clauses (e.g., The rubbish was taken out by John. Fred did [] too/Fred did it too). The results show first that VPE involves greater processing costs than VPA overall. Second, although the structural nonparallelism of the antecedent clause elicited a processing cost for both anaphor types, there was a difference in the timing and the strength of this parallelism effect: it was earlier and more fleeting for VPA, as evidenced by regression path times, whereas the effect occurred later with VPE completions, showing up in second and total fixation times measures, and continuing on into the reading of the adjacent text. Taking the observed differences between the processing of the two anaphor types together with other research findings in the literature, we argue that our data support the idea that in the case of VPE, the VP from the antecedent clause necessitates more computation at the elision site before it is linked to its antecedent than is the case for VPA.

ANAPHORS IN CASUAL AND CONTROLLED TALK GROUPS OF IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS

By relying mainly on the accessibility approach to anaphora, this article intends to analyze the types, distributions and retrieval of anaphors in two forms of spoken discourse: casual and controlled talk. For the specific purposes of the study, twenty sophomore Iranian students were randomly selected to conduct the talks. The subjects were divided into two groups of casual and controlled talk. According to the settings and adopted topics, the overall casual talk group was further divided into two groups of dorm and academic talk. In the end, it was observed that as the talk situations vary, types, frequencies, distances, retrieval qualities and thematic structure (patterning) of anaphors undergo dramatic changes too. Further analyses of the obtained data show that the number of pronominal anaphors is by far more than NP anaphors in dorm casual talk whereas in academic casual talk the number of NP anaphors exceeds that of the former talk groups. However, the distribution of anaphors in the performance of controlled talk groups has shown to be more moderate with regard to the types of anaphors used in it. Overall, the distributional patterns of various anaphoric devices in different talk situations are considered to be a function of the speakers’ evaluation of the cognitive states of the listeners/addressees. Average distances and frequencies of the different types of zero, pronominal, and NP anaphors have also been shown to undergo dramatic changes as talk situations vary.

Anaphoric reference in clinical reports: Characteristics of an annotated corpus

MotivationExpressions that refer to a real-world entity already mentioned in a narrative are often considered anaphoric. For example, in the sentence “The pain comes and goes,” the expression “the pain” is probably referring to a previous mention of pain. Interpretation of meaning involves resolving the anaphoric reference: deciding which expression in the text is the correct antecedent of the referring expression, also called an anaphor. We annotated a set of 180 clinical reports (surgical pathology, radiology, discharge summaries, and emergency department) from two institutions to indicate all anaphor–antecedent pairs. ObjectiveThe objective of this study is to describe the characteristics of the corpus in terms of the frequency of anaphoric relations, the syntactic and semantic nature of the members of the pairs, and the types of anaphoric relations that occur. Understanding how anaphoric reference is exhibited in clinical reports is critical to developing reference resolution algorithms and to identifying peculiarities of clinical text that may alter the features and methodologies that will be successful for automated anaphora resolution. ResultsWe found that anaphoric reference is prevalent in all types of clinical reports, that annotations of noun phrases, semantic type, and section headings may be especially important for automated resolution of anaphoric reference, and that separate modules for reference resolution may be required for different report types, different institutions, and different types of anaphors. Accurate resolution will probably require extensive domain knowledge—especially for pathology and radiology reports with more part/whole and set/subset relations. ConclusionWe hope researchers will leverage the annotations in this corpus to develop automated algorithms and will add to the annotations to generate a more extensive corpus.

COMPARING PRONOUN RESOLUTION ALGORITHMS

This paper discusses the comparative evaluation of five well-known pronoun resolution algorithms conducted with the help of a purpose-built tool for consistent evaluation in anaphora resolution, termed the evaluation workbench. The workbench enables the evaluation and comparison of pronoun resolution algorithms on the basis of the same preprocessing tools and test data. The tool is controlled by the user who can conduct the evaluation according to a variety of parameters, with regard to the types of anaphors and the samples used for evaluation. The extensive comparative evaluation of the pronoun resolution algorithms showed that their performance was significantly lower than the figures reported in the original papers describing the algorithms. The evaluation study concluded that the main reason for this drop in performance is the fact that all algorithms operate in a fully automatic mode.

When the Creampuff Beat the Boxer: Working Memory, Cost, and Function in Reading Metaphoric Reference

Following Almor's (1999) cost-function analysis of referential processing, we hypothesized that reading times of metaphoric anaphors are affected by readers' working memory ability and reflect a balance between discourse function and processing cost. The results from 2 self-paced reading experiments supported this hypothesis. Low-span participants always read sentences with metaphoric anaphors slower than sentences with literal anaphors. In contrast, high-span participants did not take longer to read sentences with metaphoric anaphors than those with literal anaphors when the preceding context activated enough information to facilitate reference resolution. However, when the context activated so much information that the metaphor's function was obviated, high-span readers suffered and again read sentences with metaphoric anaphors more slowly than sentences with literal anaphors. These results show that, as with other types of anaphors, processing metaphoric anaphors is affected by working memory performance, and that the balance between processing cost and discourse function varies with working memory ability.

Antecedent reactivation by surface and deep anaphora in Norwegian

Anaphora are expressions in language that depend on other linguistic entities for their full meaning. They can furthermore be divided into two types according to the level of representation where they find their antecedents: Surface anaphora, which resolve their reference at the sentence representation level, and deep anaphora, which resolve their reference at the non-grammatical level of discourse representation. The linguistic theory of these two anaphor types, and recent findings about processing differences at these two levels, combine to predict that surface anaphora should show fast and immediate reactivation of their antecedents, whereas deep anaphora should have a slower time course of antecedent re-access. These predictions were confirmed with two lexical decision task experiments with Norwegian stimuli.

Compréhension de l'oral chez de jeunes enfants bons et mauvais compreneurs de textes écrits

Summary : Listening comprehension in first-grade skilled and less-skilled comprehenders for written texts In line with Nation and Snowling's (1997, 1999) position, two experiments with first-grade children (mean age : 6;9) examined the hypothesis that less-skilled comprehenders in a reading task have language difficulties in high-level processes, such as processing of anaphors. Reading and listening comprehension were measured by means of a global test. With skilled and less-skilled comprehenders in the reading test, the on-line processing of three types of anaphor (repeated noun, general noun and pronoun) was investigated in a listening situation, by means of an error-detection paradigm. Error-detection performance was better and faster if the anaphor was solved. In experiment 1, two types of errors were used : phonological errors and phonologico-semantic errors. In experiment 2, only phonological errors were used, the phonemic distance between the phoneme-source and the phoneme-target in the non-word being low or high. In the two experiments, reading comprehension and listening comprehension were strongly correlated. Less-skilled comprehenders showed markedly lower oral performance than skilled comprehenders. In experiment 1, the percentage of detection was lower in less-skilled comprehenders and detection time was similar in the two groups. For phonologico-semantic errors, detection time was longer for general nouns in less-skilled comprehenders. In experiment 2, the percentage of detection was lower and detection time was longer in less-skilled comprehenders, for low and high distant errors. Performance did not vary as a function of type of anaphor, for skilled or for less-skilled comprehenders. These data did not support the hypothesis that less-skilled comprehenders have an impairment in on-line processing of anaphors in a listening situation. However, a qualitative analysis showed specifie difficulties in less-skilled comprehenders. Results were interpreted in terms ofthe « quality » of lexical representations (Perfetti & Hart, 2001). The paradigm used for investigating the processing of anaphors was discussed. Key words : reading comprehension difficulties in children, listening comprehension, on-line processing of anaphors.

The roles of (written) text and anaphor-type distribution in the construction of discourse

The aim of this article is to demonstrate, using two attested texts (newspaper articles), how the reader creates discourse on the basis of the many and varied types of textual cues supplied by the writer, in terms of a relevant context. It also aims to show how the different distributions of anaphor types in given texts correlate with the discourse function of the segment in which the anaphor occurs (and particularly with the [sub]genre of the text involved). After drawing a distinction between the complementary dimensions of text and discourse, the article outlines a particular approach to discourse anaphora which emphasizes the roles of the type of anaphoric expression chosen, its combination with the predicator and other features of the anaphoric predication, and the kind of coherence or discourse relation in terms of which that predication is indicated as needing to be integrated with a given discourse context. Finally, two attested example texts are analyzed in terms of their discourse structure and of the ways in which the anaphoric and cohesive relations signaled help to structure the discourse derivable from them. Here, I try to show how the process of establishing the referents of given anaphors involves the modification of existing discourse representations, as a function both of the content of the anaphoric predication and its mode of integration with the discourse context of which these representations are part.

Dialogue Acts, Synchronizing Units, and Anaphora Resolution

In this paper, we present the results of a corpus analysis, and a model of anaphora resolution in spontaneous spoken dialogues. The main finding of our corpus analysis is that less than half the pronouns and demonstratives have NP antecedents in the preceding text; 22% have sentential antecedents and the remainder have no identifiable linguistic antecedents. As part of the corpus analysis we present the results of inter-annotat or agreement tests. These were carried out for the annotation of anaphor types and their antecedents, and for the segmentation of the dialogues into dialogue acts. The results of the inter-annotator agreement tests indicate that our classification method is reliable and that the annotated dialogues can be used as a standard against which to measure the performance of the anaphor resolution algorithm. The algorithm, based on Strube (1998), is capable of classifying pronouns and demonstratives, and co-indexing anaphors with NP and sentential antecedents. The domain from which potential antecedents for both individual and discourse-deictic anaphors can be elicited is defined in terms of dialogue acts. The dialogue segmentation method uses dialogue acts to form Synchronizing Units, which reflect the achievement of common ground (Stalnaker 1974, 1979). We show that predicate information, NP form, and dialogue structure can be successfully used in the resolution process.

Coherence

Abstract. Coherence, which is an interpretative principle utilised by cooperative speakers/writers and hearers/readers, should not be confused with cohesion. Cohesion markers are not strictly necessary for the achievement of a coherent interpretation of a fragment of text, relative to some context, and overt incohesion does not necessarily point to an incoherent interpretation of the co-text. Anaphor resolution is a crucial part of the process of integration by which hearers/readers guided by the coherence principle integrate their interpretation of the current incoming clause into the current discourse model. A detailed study of the interdependencies holding between discourse model, antecedent-trigger predication, and anaphoric predication, shows that the anaphoric predication, just as much as the particular type of anaphor selected, plays a more fundamental role than the current discourse context in real discourse understanding.