Previous research, for example in English, French, German, and Spanish, has investigated the interplay between grammatical gender information and stereotype gender information (e.g., that secretaries are usually female, in many cultures), in the interpretation of both singular noun phrases (the secretary) and plural nouns phrases, particularly so-called generic masculines-nouns that have mascul...

Coreference resolution involves nding antecedents for anaphoric discourse entities, such as deenite noun phrases. But many deenite noun phrases are not anaphoric because their meaning can be understood from general world knowledge (e.g., \the White House" or \the news media"). We have developed a corpus-based algorithm for automatically identifying deenite noun phrases that are non-anaphoric, w...

We present a system that produces sentential descriptions of video: who did what to whom, and where and how they did it. Action class is rendered as a verb, participant objects as noun phrases, properties of those objects as adjectival modifiers in those noun phrases, spatial relations between those participants as prepositional phrases, and characteristics of the event as prepositional-phrase ...

In his recent article Deutscher (2009: 199) suggests that “nominalization is an unsung hero in the story of subordination”. He goes on to say that “[t]he ability to derive a noun from a verb, that is, to reify a verbal predicate and present it as a nominal argument or modifier, is the core of subordination”. While Deutscher (2009) believes that the relevant nominalization for his study is “deri...

The present work describes a Phrasal Example Based Machine Translation system from English to Bengali that identifies the phrases in the input through a shallow analysis, retrieves the target phrases using a Phrasal Example base and finally combines the target language phrases employing some heuristics based on the phrase ordering rules for Bengali. The paper focuses on the structure of the nou...

In three eyetracking studies, we investigated the role of conceptual plurality in initial parsing decisions in temporarily ambiguous sentences with reciprocal verbs (e.g., While the lovers kissed the baby played alone). We varied the subject of the first clause using three types of plural noun phrases: conjoined noun phrases (the bride and the groom), plural definite descriptions (the lovers), ...

A fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing is the integration of syntactic and semantic constraints. In this paper we describe a new approach for the integration of syntactic and semantic constraints which takes advantage of a learned memory model. Our model combines localist representations for the integration of constraints and distributed representations for learning semantic const...

The referential properties of noun phrases in the Japanese language, which has no articles, are useful for article generation in JapaneseEnglish machine translation and for anaphora resolution in Japanese noun phrases. They are generally classified as generic noun phrases, definite noun phrases, and indefinite noun phrases. In the previous work, referential properties were estimated by developi...

Models of interference in sentence processing claim that object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relatives due to interference between the subject and object noun phrase. The interference effect for object relatives at the verb should be more pronounced when the two noun phrases retrieved from memory are similar. To test this, two eye tracking experiments manipulated whether ...