Zero Pronouns Research Articles

A New Method to Find Zero Pronouns Referring to Entry Words and Estimate their Surface Cases in the Context of a World History Glossary and its Descriptions

A New Method to Find Zero Pronouns Referring to Entry Words and Estimate their Surface Cases in the Context of a World History Glossary and its Descriptions

Overt versus Zero Pronouns in Mandarin Chinese

The distribution of Mandarin overt and zero pronouns in donkey sentences is compatible with what has been found in Japanese. Most cases can be accounted for by a distinction of binding methods: specifically, overt pronouns must be dynamically bound, and zero pronouns could be either dynamically bound or interpreted via the E-type strategy. However, in both languages, the classic “every farmer who owns a donkey beats it” sentence behaves unexpectedly. To resolve this inconsistency, an additional criterion, unique versus anaphoric definites, is introduced. This approach also sheds light on the syntactic representation of pronouns in Mandarin.

Discourse Functions of Zero Pronouns in Tai Dam

Discourse Functions of Zero Pronouns in Tai Dam

조응성 정보와 중심화 이론에 기반한 영형 주어의 선행사 식별

본 논문은 지역적 응집성을 모델링하는 중심화 이론을 이용하여 한국어 영형대명사의 지시해결에 접근한다. 중심화 이론은 영어 대명사의 해결을 위해 널리 사용되고 있지만, 일본어, 한국어 등의 언어에서 나타나는 영형대명사 해결에 중심화의 프레임워크를 적용하는 데에는 많은 어려움이 따른다. Grosz et al.의 중심화 이론은 지시적 표현들의 비조응적 사용을 고려하지 않으므로, 문서에 나타나는 비조응적 기능의 영형 대명사가 중심화 이론을 이용한 영형대명사의 선행사 식별에 중요한 영향을 미친다. 본 논문은 이를 위해 먼저 절 간의 결속 관계를 이용하여 영형대명사, 특히 영형주어의 문장 내 조응성을 결정하고, 다음으로 중심화의 순위를 이용하여 그 영형의 선행사를 식별하는 방법을 제안한다. 실험을 통해 조응성 결정을 이용하는 제안한 방법이 이를 이용하지 않는 베이스라인 시스템보다 우수함을 알 수 있었다. This paper approaches the problem of resolving Korean zero pronouns using Centering Theory modeling local coherence. Centering Theory has been widely used to resolve English pronouns. However, it is much difficult to apply the centering framework for zero pronoun resolution in languages such as Japanese and Korean. Since in particular the use of non-anaphoric zero pronouns without explicit antecedents is not considered in the Centering Theory of Grosz et al., the presence of non-anaphoric cases negatively affects the performance of the resolution system based on Centering Theory. To overcome this, this paper presents a method which determines the intra-sentential anaphoricity of zero pronouns in subject position by using relationships between clauses, and then identifies antecedents of zero subjects. In our experiments, the proposed method outperforms the baseline method relying solely on Centering Theory.

Generation of Zero Pronouns Based on the Centering Theory and Pairwise Salience of Entities

This paper investigates zero pronouns in Korean, especially focusing on the center transitions of adjacent utterances under the framework of Centering Theory. Four types of nominal entity (Epair, Einter, Eintra, and Enon) from Centering Theory are defined with the concept of inter-, intra-, and pairwise salience. For each entity type, a case study of zero phenomena is performed through analyzing corpus and building a pronominalization model. This study shows that the zero phenomena of entities which have been neglected in previous Centering works are explained via the center transition of the second previous utterance, and provides valuable results for pronominalization of such entities, such as p2-trans rule. We improve the accuracy of pronominalization model by optimal feature selection and show that our accuracy outperforms the accuracy of previous works.

Translation of Pronominal Anaphora between English and Spanish: Discrepancies and Evaluation

This paper evaluates the different tasks carried out in the translation of pronominal anaphora in a machine translation (MT) system. The MT interlingua approach named AGIR (Anaphora Generation with an Interlingua Representation) improves upon other proposals presented to date because it is able to translate intersentential anaphors, detect co-reference chains, and translate Spanish zero pronouns into English---issues hardly considered by other systems. The paper presents the resolution and evaluation of these anaphora problems in AGIR with the use of different kinds of knowledge (lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic). The translation of English and Spanish anaphoric third-person personal pronouns (including Spanish zero pronouns) into the target language has been evaluated on unrestricted corpora. We have obtained a precision of 80.4% and 84.8% in the translation of Spanish and English pronouns, respectively. Although we have only studied the Spanish and English languages, our approach can be easily extended to other languages such as Portuguese, Italian, or Japanese.

Automatic Extraction of Rules for AnaphoraResolution of Japanese Zero Pronouns in Japanese–English Machine Translation from Aligned Sentence Pairs

This paper proposes a method to extract rules for the anaphora resolution of Japanese zero pronouns in Japanese–English MT from aligned sentence pairs. After aligned sentence pairs unsuitable for rule extraction because of analysis errors or free translations are automatically rejected, zero pronouns in the Japanese sentences and the English translation equivalents of their antecedents are extracted from the remaining Japanese and English aligned sentence pairs using ten hand-developed alignment rules. This method identifies all Japanese zero pronouns whose translation equivalents are not explicitly expressed in an English sentence, this method identifies these as unalignable. Then, resolution rules for the remaining zero pronouns are automatically extracted using the aligned pairs, equivalent word/phrase pairs extracted from the aligned sentence pairs, and the syntactic and semantic structures of the Japanese sentences. This method was implemented in a Japanese–English MT system, ALT-J/E. 98.4% of all pairs were automatically aligned correctly in a window test, and 94.0% in a blind test. Furthermore, extracted rules for zero pronouns with deictic references created automatically from sentence pairs correctly resolved 99.0% of the zero pronouns in a window test and 85.0% of the zero pronouns in a blind test.

Intrasentential Resolution of Japanese Zero Pronouns using Pragmatic and Semantic Constraints

照応要素が同一文内に現れる日本語ゼロ代名詞に対する, 語用論的・意味論的制約を用いた照応解析の手法を提案する. 本手法は, 接続語のタイプ, 用言意味属性, 様相表現のタイプの3種類の語用論的・意味論的制約に着目して, 同一文中に照応要素を持つゼロ代名詞の照応要素を決定するものである. 本手法を日英翻訳システムALT-J/E上に実現して, 日英翻訳システム評価用例文 (3718文) 中に含まれる文内照応のゼロ代名詞139件を対象に, 解析ルールを整備し, 解析精度の評価実験を行なった. その結果, 上記3種類の制約条件を用いた場合, それぞれの条件が文内照応解析に有効に働き, 対象としたゼロ代名詞が再現率98%, 適合率100%の精度で正しく照応要素を決定できることが分かった. 本手法を, 従来の代表的な手法であるCenteringアルゴリズム (再現率74%, 適合率89%) と比べると, 再現率, 適合率共に十分高い. 特に, 適合率100%と, 認定した照応関係に誤りがないことから, 本手法が機械翻訳システムでの実現に適することがわかった. 以上の結果, 提案した方式の有効性が実証された. 今後, さらに多くの文を対象に解析ルールの整備を進めることにより, 同一文内照応要素を持つゼロ代名詞の大半を復元し, 補完できる見通しとなった.

Acquiring Nothing?

Some earlier SLA research suggests that zero pronouns should be easily acquired by second language learners, yet this has not been carefully examined because studies of nominal reference are usually limited to the acquisition of languages that do not have zero pronouns. This study examines how speakers of languages with zero pronouns (Japanese) and without them (English) use zero pronouns when acquiring a language that has them (Mandarin Chinese). The findings show that second language learners do not use zero pronouns as often as native speakers and that their use increases with proficiency. When examined more closely, it can be seen that the speakers have no difficulty using zero pronouns when there is a syntactic or semantic restriction, but they do have difficulty at the discourse level. It is claimed that this underuse of zero pronouns corresponds with other research that shows that second language learners tend to avoid pronouns in favor of full noun phrases. Some explanations for these phenomena are postulated.

Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar

Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar