kakhki dialect is one of the dialects of the south of razavi khorasan province which is spoken in a subdivision of gonabad, called “kakhk”. this dialect and two other dialects (khaniki and ferdowsi), as far as the researcher knows, are the only linguistically described dialects in the razavi khorasan and south khorasan provinces which have the ergative case marking. ergative case marking in thi...

Pronouns without explicit noun phrase antecedents pose a problem for any theory of reference resolution. We report here on an empirical study of such pronouns in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, a corpus of spontaneous, casual conversation. Analysis of 2,046 third person personal pronouns in fourteen transcripts indicates that 330 (or 16.1%) lack NP antecedents. These pronou...

State-of-the-art Chinese zero pronoun resolution systems are supervised, thus relying on training data containing manually resolved zero pronouns. To eliminate the reliance on annotated data, we present a generative model for unsupervised Chinese zero pronoun resolution. At the core of our model is a novel hypothesis: a probabilistic pronoun resolver trained on overt pronouns in an unsupervised...

In this paper, we discuss the representation of pronouns in logical form for the purpose of handling verb phrase ellipsis. In particular, we discuss two factors which innuence the representation of pronouns in a computational model. The rst is computational, the other linguistic. Both factors must be attended to in order to construct a good representation for pronouns in logical form. We review...

Anaphora resolution is still a challenging research field in natural language processing, lacking an algorithm that correctly resolves anaphoric pronouns. Anaphoric zero pronouns pose an even greater challenge, since this category is not lexically realised. Thus, their resolution is conditioned by their prior identification stage. This paper reports on the distribution of zero pronouns in Roman...

In this paper we present a method of detecting zero pronouns in Japanese clauses and identifying their antecedents using aligned sentence pairs from a Japanese-English bilingual corpus and open resource tools. We use syntactic and semantic structures and the alignment of words and phrases in the sentence pairs to automatically detect zero pronouns and determine their antecedents using English t...

The paper presents a tentative overview of pronouns in Ginyanga, an understudied Kwa language spoken Togo and Ghana; particular, personal pronouns, reflexive demonstratives, quantifiers. There are no subject Ginyanga. We define two pronoun series with designated for each noun class: basic (emphatic possessive) object. set is used independent possessive contexts, as well constructions. Guang sys...

This paper presents a new study on the distribution, identification, and resolution of zero pronouns in Romanian. A Romanian corpus, including legal, encyclopaedic, literary, and news texts has been created and manually annotated for zero pronouns. Using a morphological parser for Romanian and machine learning methods, experiments were performed on the created corpus for the identification and ...

In two self-paced, sentence-by-sentence reading experiments we examined the difference in the processing of Spanish discourses with repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns in emphatic and non-emphatic contexts. In Experiment 1, repeated names and overt pronouns caused a processing delay when they referred to salient antecedents in non-emphatic contexts. In Experiment 2, both processin...

This paper addresses the question of whether and how the semantics of third-person pronouns can vary across languages. I investigate third-person non-demonstrative pronouns in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish), including null pro and its overt animate plural counterpart wit. I provide evidence for a striking cross-linguistic difference between the St’át’imcets pronouns and English ones: third-pers...