We present our systems for the WMT 2016 shared task on cross-lingual pronoun prediction. The main contribution is a classifier used to determine whether an instance of the ambiguous English pronoun “it” functions as an anaphoric, pleonastic or event reference pronoun. For the English-to-French task the classifier is incorporated in an extended baseline, which takes the form of a source-aware la...

things (substances, events, abstractions); Corbett (2000, chap. 3) reviewed the relevant evidence regarding linguistic number. Because less imageable referents have less discernible internal boundaries, they may tend to be construed as units even when they are potentially ambiguous in notional number (Eberhard, 1999). Ambiguities in notional number result from conflicts in valuation that can co...

Many comprehension studies have shown that children as late as age 6 ; 6 misinterpret object pronouns as co-referring with the referential subject about half the time. A recent review of earlier experiments testing children's interpretation of object pronouns in sentences with quantified subjects (Elbourne, 2005) also suggests that there is a 'Pronoun Interpretation Problem'. In contrast, two e...

We describe the annotation of cases of extraction in French, whose previous annotations in the available French treebanks were insufficient to recover the correct predicate-argument dependency between the extracted element and its head. These cases are special cases of LDDs, that we call effectively longdistance dependencies (eLDDs), in which the extracted element is indeed separated from its h...

Pronoun reversals occur when a pronoun is incorrectly mapped to the wrong referent. For example, when a child says, “You eat the cookie!” and intended to state that he is eating a cookie. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, ASD, are known to be frequent reversers, but their development of these reversals; for example, incidence rate and endpoint, is still unknown. In this study, children in...

The present study aims to investigated Iranian L2 speaker`s knowledge of the overt pronounconstraint (OPC) in English. It also aims to examine L2 learners understanding of UniversalGrammar (Chomsky 1981, 1986, 2000, 2001) and if it is common to all languages. Specifically,this study takes a new look at the L2 acquisition of knowledge of the overt pronoun constraint(Montalbetti 1984) by Persian ...