Identifying reference to abstract objects in dialogue

In two experiments, many annotators marked antecedents for discourse deixis as unconstrained regions of text. The experiments show that annotators do converge on the identity of these text regions, though much of what they do can be captured by a simple model. Demonstrative pronouns are more likely than definite descriptions to be marked with discourse antecedents. We suggest that our methodology is suitable for the systematic study of discourse deixis.