Antecedent (grammar)

About: Antecedent (grammar) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1392 publications have been published within this topic receiving 41824 citations.

Correlates of Organizational and Professional Commitment The Case of Musicians in Symphony Orchestras

Abstract: Survey data gathered from 65 musicians in an east coast symphony orchestra were used to examine the correlates of commitment to the organization and commitment to the music profession. The study results indicate that the two types of commitment are the product of different antecedent factors and have different implications for musicians' continued membership in the orchestra. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Subject preference in Korean

Abstract: Long-distance dependencies have long been at the center of linguists’ attention, and have played an important role in the ongoing dialogue between theoreticians and experimentalists, who share an interest in the motivation for empty categories and in the nature of filler-gap relationships. In this paper, we address certain issues that arise with regard to Korean relative clauses from both a theoretical and an experimental perspective. Theoretically, the data that we present shed additional light on—but do not entirely resolve—long-standing controversies pertaining to the appropriate analysis of Korean relative clauses. Experimentally, we present robust evidence that even in head-final languages like Korean, subject gaps of all types enjoy a processing advantage. Long-distance dependencies between two clausal positions have two crucial characteristics. First, a more articulated expression in one of these positions determines the referential identity of the linguistic expression in the other position. This latter expression typically has less descriptive content and may even be null. For example, a lexically specified noun phrase can serve as the antecedent of a pronoun (including a null pronoun) (1a), an epithet (1b), or a hypothetical null element (1c). Second, the relationship between the lexically specified antecedent (filler) and the less elaborated expression or null element (gap) is established at a distance, across other linguistic expressions that separate them. This distance between the two positions imposes a burden on working memory: the first linguistic position has to be held in (or retrieved from) working memory so that it can be associated with the second.

Processes involved in the resolution of explicit anaphors

Abstract: Two experiments were conducted to examine the processes involved in the reactivation of antecedents in response to explicit anaphors (i.e., anaphors that are both lexically and conceptually identical to an antecedent). Participants read passages containing anaphors that were either lexically and conceptually identical to a target antecedent, or passages containing anaphors that were lexically identical to but conceptually different from a target antecedent. Experiment 1 demonstrated that explicit anaphors only reactivate target antecedents when they are both lexically and conceptually identical to a target antecedent. However, as the distance between an anaphor and its antecedent increased, even an explicit anaphor did not reactivate a target antecedent. In Experiment 2, an adjective modifier was added to the anaphoric noun phrase, which increased the degree of featural overlap between the anaphoric noun phrase and the target antecedent. With the added information in the anaphoric noun phrase, distant ant...

Acquisition and application of contextual role knowledge for coreference resolution

Abstract: Coreference resolution is the process of identifying when two noun phrases (NP) refer to the same entity. This dissertation makes two main contributions to computational coreference resolution. First, this work contributes a new method for recognizing when an NP is anaphoric. Most pronouns have an antecedent, but many definite noun phrases do not. I present an unsupervised model for learning nonanaphoric definite NPs from a text collection, and I show that it learns lists of these noun phrases with good accuracy. Recall of these NPs increases from 43% to 79%. I also demonstrate that using these lists to filter nonanaphoric definite NPs prior to coreference resolution provides a mechanism for effecting a recall/precision tradeoff. In two distinct testing domains, recall is traded for precision, leading to precision increases from 60% to 73% and from 68% to 82%. Second, traditional approaches to coreference resolution typically select the most appropriate antecedent by recognizing word similarity, proximity, and agreement in number, gender, and semantic class. This work contributes a new source of evidence that focuses on the roles that an anaphor and antecedent play in particular events or relationships. I show that using contextual role knowledge as part of the coreference resolution process increases the number of anaphors that can be resolved, and I demonstrate an unsupervised method for acquiring contextual role knowledge that does not require an annotated training corpus. A probabilistic model based on the Dempster-Shafer model of evidence is used to incorporate contextual role knowledge with traditional evidence sources. Among the advantages of this model is the capability to assign evidence to a set of candidates when a knowledge source is unable to distinguish among them. In the two testing domains, the F-measure of anaphor/antecedent pairs increases from 0.57 to 0.61 and from 0.57 to 0.63. Recall increases from 46% to 53% and from 42% to 51% with only minor reductions in precision.