This paper discusses the proposals of Li and Thompson (1977), Yen (1986), and Feng (1993) in relation to the development of the Chinese copula and argues that Li and Thompson’s suggestion of a topic mechanism, Yen’s analogical change, and Feng’s phonological pause are unsatisfactory in explaining the development of the copula. It is suggested that Katz’s (1996) cognitive concept of existence in...

This paper proposes a statistical zero pronoun resolution method that utilizes features of verbs. In Japanese speech, the subject is often omitted, especially when it is the first person. To resolve such zero pronouns, features related to the verbs such as functional expressions play important roles. However, recent state-of-the-art zero-pronoun resolution systems lack these features because th...

Two experiments explore how pronoun resolution is influenced by a) properties of discourse referents, specifically whether they are underspecified and in need of description, and b) the contribution of the pronoun-containing utterance, specifically whether it provides a description or specifies an event. We find that these factors interact, such that when an underspecified referent is in focus,...

Indefinite noun phrases in certain contexts are unable to support anaphoric coreference to an individual entity, and therefore should be ignored when searching for coreferent antecedents of anaphoric pronouns. However, many algorithms for anaphora resolution utilize noun phrase chunking or shallow parsing, and therefore do not make the needed distinctions to avoid this type of spurious antecede...

In written Chinese, personal pronouns are commonly dropped when they can be inferred from context. This practice is particularly common in informal genres like Short Message Service (SMS) messages sent via cell phones. Restoring dropped personal pronouns can be a useful preprocessing step for information extraction. Dropped personal pronoun recovery can be divided into two subtasks: (1) detecti...

Prescriptive and descriptive grammars of Hungarian frequently discuss variation in the choice of relative pronoun in Hungarian. This paper presents quantitative data about some long standing questions raised by prescriptivists, and a phenomenon that has not been explored: the lack of agreement between the pronoun and the antecedent in Colloquial Hungarian. The study presented here is based on t...

We present PROTEST, a test suite for the evaluation of pronoun translation by MT systems. The test suite comprises 250 hand-selected pronoun tokens and an automatic evaluation method which compares the translations of pronouns in MT output with those in the reference translation. Pronoun translations that do not match the reference are referred for manual evaluation. PROTEST is designed to supp...

In this paper, we present PYCOT, a pronoun resolution toolkit. This toolkit is written in the Python programming language and is intended to be an addition to the open-source NLTK collection of natural language processing tools. We discuss the design of the module as well as studies of its performance on pronoun resolution in English and in Korean.

Verbal communication is often ambiguous. By employing the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study investigated how a comprehender resolves referential ambiguity by using information concerning the social status of communicators. Participants read a conversational scenario which included a minimal conversational context describing a speaker and two other persons of the same or differ...