On the (Ir)relevance of Psycholinguistics for Anaphora Resolution
نویسندگان
چکیده
Psycholinguistic experiments show that pronouns tend to be resolved differently depending on whether they occur in main or subordinate clauses. If a pronoun in a subordinate clause has more than one potential antecedent in the main clause, then the pronoun tends to refer to the antecedent which has a certain thematic role (depending on the verb and on the subordinating conjunction). In contrast, pronouns in main clauses tend to refer back to the subject of the previous main clause, and this tendency is not affected by any verbs or conjunctions. In natural language processing, these findings have recently led to a proposal that pronoun resolution systems should have a split architecture, i.e. that they should use different mechanisms for pronoun resolution in the two cases. With the help of two parsed and coreference-annotated corpora, this paper estimates the impact of the split-architecture proposal. The findings of this work are as follows: (1) Subject pronouns in authentic texts behave the same way in main and subordinate clauses. (2) The number of sentences in which a split architecture would behave differently than a system that treats both cases the same way is close to zero. Therefore, a separate treatment of resolution within and across units is unlikely to improve the performance of any system. This result casts a doubt on the split-architecture proposal, and more generally on approaches that directly incorporate psycholinguistic results into performance-oriented algorithms for anaphora resolution without assessing the relative importance of the phenomena that underlie them.
منابع مشابه
A Statistical Model of Nominal Anaphora
In this paper, we present an analysis of nominal anaphora along with a probabilistic model of nominal anaphora resolution. Throughout this work we focus on non-pronominal anaphora. The goal of this work is to present a viable probabilistic model that is consistent with the ideas of theoretical linguistics and the results of experimental psycholinguistics. Where applicable, we present research w...
متن کاملAmbiguity in Anaphora
This paper presents novel psycholinguistic evidence on the factors governing pronoun resolution in German. To determine the relative influence of linear order versus grammatical function of potential referents in the German Mittelfeld on pronoun interpretation, an interpretation-preference task was run on 23 German natives. Subjects chose the preferred referent for fully ambiguous personal pron...
متن کاملA Survey of Studies of Bridging Anaphora
This paper aims to review previous major studies of bridging anaphora resolution and generation in terms of their major views, advantages and inadequacies of each theory from the psychological, coherence-based, corpus-based, relevance-theoretic, cognitive, formal and computational perspectives. Then a critique of previous approaches to BA resolution and generation are made for future studies.
متن کاملThe Effect of Anaphor and Ellipsis Resolution on Proximity Searching in a Text Database
So far, methods for ellipsis and anaphor resolution have been developed and the effects of anaphor resolution have been analyzed in the context of statistical information retrieval (IR) of scientific abstracts. No significant improvement has been observed. In this study, the effects of ellipsis and anaphor resolution on proximity searching in a full text database are analyzed. Anaphora and elli...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2006