This paper examines the automatic and strategic use of gender information in pronominal processing. Experiments 1 and 2 used short sentences where a pronoun was preceded by two potential antecedents. Results showed that even when adult readers did not use pronominal gender to strategically accelerate pronominal resolution, they remained sensitive to a gender disagreement between the pronoun and...

This paper considers the notorious Double Nominative Constructions (DNCs) found in Korean, and argues that these constructions are derived from a locative construction. Based on Freeze (1992) and Perlmutter (1978), I will show that the derivation in Korean DNCs is the same as that found in English possessive, existential and locative sentences (see Fillmore (1968), Kuno (1971) and Lyons (1967) ...

The Idiap NLP Group has participated in both DiscoMT 2015 sub-tasks: pronounfocused translation and pronoun prediction. The system for the first sub-task combines two knowledge sources: grammatical constraints from the hypothesized coreference links, and candidate translations from an SMT decoder. The system for the second sub-task avoids hypothesizing a coreference link, and uses instead a lar...

We extend Zhao and Ng's (2007) Chinese anaphoric zero pronoun resolver by (1) using a richer set of features and (2) exploiting the coreference links between zero pronouns during resolution. Results on OntoNotes show that our approach significantly outperforms two state-of-the-art anaphoric zero pronoun resolvers. To our knowledge, this is the first work to report results obtained by an end-toe...

Event anaphora resolution plays a critical role in discourse analysis. This paper proposes a tree kernel-based framework for event pronoun resolution. In particular, a new tree expansion scheme is introduced to automatically determine a proper parse tree structure for event pronoun resolution by considering various kinds of competitive information related with the anaphor and the antecedent can...

In a language that allows null pronouns, why would a speaker bother to use an overt pronoun at all? A traditional answer is that an overt pronoun contains agreement information necessary for the identification of its antecedent. But this cannot possibly be the answer in languages like Turkish, which has subject-verb agreement, but no gender; since the verb already indicates the person and numbe...

Kehler and Rohde (2013) proposed a Bayesian theory of pronoun interpretation where the influence of world knowledge emerges as effects on the prior and the influence of information structure as effects on the likelihood: P(referent|pronoun) μ P(pronoun|referent)P(referent). Here we present two experiments on Mandarin Chinese that allow us to test the generality of the theory for a language with...

There are two main approaches to the problem of donkey anaphora (e.g. John owns a donkey. He beats it). Proponents of Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982) revise quantification so as to allow an existential quantifier to bind a pronoun which is not within its syntactic scope which yields a formal link between the quantifier and the pronoun, as is illustrated in (1)a. By contra...