Antecedent (grammar)

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

Pronoun resolution and the influence of syntactic and semantic information on discourse prominence

Abstract: Beginning with the observation that syntactic and semantic information often coincide (i.e., subjects are often agents, objects often patients), this study investigates the possibility that preference to resolve a sentence-initial pronoun to a syntactically prominent antecedent might actually be better explained in terms of preference for resolving to a semantically prominent antecedent. The study takes Discourse Prominence Theory (Gordon and Hendrick [11, 12]) as an underlying framework. Results of three psycholinguistic experiments using a self-paced reading task show that both syntactic and semantic information guide readers' pronoun resolution preferences. This suggests a revised understanding of Discourse Prominence Theory in which the prominence of discourse referents is determined through a complex process depending on multiple linguistic factors. Results further show that the relative degree of prominence among competing candidates influences resolution processes.

Anaphoric pronouns for topic devices: theoretical claims and acquisitional evidence.

Abstract: West-European languages use articles to distinguish arguments as . Besides articles there are personal pronouns that are to be indexed with a discourse antecedent. Superimposed on that system there are additional devices to indicate whether a clause has the same or a different element as its topic. If a sentence takes a topic different from the topic of the preceding sentence, there are devices with enhanced saliency to mark the sentence as . These devices vary with the type of language. The present paper will characterize the anaphoric pronouns in Germanic and Romance languages and range them upon a saliency scale. This will bring about a new analysis of the accessibility hierarchy for the antecedent. Subsequently, I will discuss the acquisition of anaphoric pronouns for in Germanic (V2nd) Dutch and Romance French. The data come from a longitudinal study of two CHILDES corpora.

Short-distance pronominals

Abstract: In both Icelandic and Faroese there are instances of pronominals taking local subject antecedents, usually when the pronominal is within a PP. This paper discusses a study on pronominals’ ability to take a local subject antecedent. The data for this study was collected in the Faroe Islands and Iceland in October and December 2009. The paper is intended to provide information concerning the possible factors facilitating pronominals’ ability to take a local subject antecedent. The focus of this study is on the effects of transitive verbs, typology of PPs and phonological heaviness of PPs on the acceptability of locally-bound pronominals in Icelandic and Faroese.

Extending Nocuous Ambiguity for Anaphora in Natural Language Requirements

Abstract: This paper presents an approach to automatically identify potentially nocuous ambiguities, which occur when text is interpreted differently by different readers of requirements written in natural language. We extract a set of anaphora ambiguities from a range of requirements documents, and collect multiple human judgments on their interpretations. The judgment distribution is used to determine if an ambiguity is nocuous or innocuous. We investigate a number of antecedent preference heuristics that we use to explore aspects of anaphora which may lead a reader to favour a particular interpretation. Using machine learning techniques, we build an automated tool to predict the antecedent preference of noun phrase candidates, which in turn is used to identify nocuous ambiguity. We report on a series of experiments that we conducted to evaluate the performance of our automated system. The results show that the system achieves high recall with a consistent improvement on baseline precision subject to some ambiguity tolerance levels, allowing us to explore and highlight realistic and potentially problematic ambiguities in actual requirements documents.