It has long been known that anaphoric relationships in the implicit meaning of an elided verb phrase depend on corresponding anaphoric relationships in the source of the ellipsis. This squib concernswhat the underlying cause of this dependency is. Does it arise directly through some uniform relation between the two clauses, or does it follow indirectly from independently motivated discourse pri...

An incremental semantics for a logic with dynamic binding is developed on the basis of a variable free notation for dynamic logic that takes its cue from De Bruijn's variable free notation for lambda calculus. De Bruijn indexing replaces variables by indices which indicate the distance to their binders. We propose to use reverse De Bruijn indexing, which works almost the same, only now the indi...

Resolving abstract anaphora is an important, but difficult task for text understanding. Yet, with recent advances in representation learning this task becomes a more tangible aim. A central property of abstract anaphora is that it establishes a relation between the anaphor embedded in the anaphoric sentence and its (typically non-nominal) antecedent. We propose a mention-ranking model that lear...

This study was undertaken to demonstrate that a property of verbs, implicit causality, is an important factor in determining coreference of potentially ambiguous anaphoric pronouns in a timed comprehension task. Subjects were required to decide the coreferentiality of a pronoun in pairs of sentences such as John telephoned Bill because he withheM some information~wanted some information. Verbs ...

In this paper, we represent singular definite noun phrases as functions in logical form. This representation is designed to model the behaviors of both anaphoric and non-anaphoric, distributive definites. It is also designed to obey the computational constraints suggested in Harper [Har88]. Our initial representation of a definite places an upper bound on its behavior given its structure and lo...

This paper concerns how to generate and understand discourse anaphoric noun phrases. I present the results of an analysis of all discourse anaphoric noun phrases (N=1,233) in a corpus of ten narrative monologues, where the choice between a definite pronoun or phrasal NP conforms largely to Gricean constraints on informativeness. I discuss Dale & Reiter’s [Dale and Reiter, To Appear] recent mode...

In this Chapter we discuss Phrase Detectives, a Game-With-A-Purpose (GWAP) for anaphoric annotation that has been one of the first GWAPs for corpus annotation and one of the most successful. We discuss the architecture of the game, evaluate its results in terms of quantity and quality of data, and explain how the data were used to create a publically available corpus that can be used to study a...