Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2003 / Which bridges for bridging definite descriptions?

Which bridges for bridging definite descriptions?

Summary

The paper examines bridging definite descriptions: definite NPs whose referent connects to an earlier "anchor" through an unstated relation, such as a ceiling belonging to a previously mentioned room. Both interpreting and generating such NPs require a finite, well-defined set of possible relations and a clear idea of where each relation's knowledge comes from. The authors argue that typologies in prior work (Clark, Strand, Kleiber) lack the precision needed for annotation and overlook relations supplied by dictionary definitions. They propose a new taxonomy that pairs each class with a semantic relation, a knowledge source and ontological type constraints. Using a dedicated NP annotation infrastructure, they apply it to the French PAROLE corpus. Meronymy turns out to be the most frequent relation, but WordNet covers only a small share of these cases. FrameNet handles most thematic cases well. About two thirds of bridges appear tractable with existing lexical resources, while the rest depend on dictionary definitions, attribute knowledge, discourse structure or deep world-knowledge reasoning. This points to the lexical resources that systems would still need.

Key points

  • Data: about 9,500 definite descriptions in PAROLE, of which 359 bridging cases were classified. Classes include Set membership, Thematic, Definitional, Individual/Attribute, Associate/Individual, Meronymic, Co-participants, Circumstantial and World knowledge.
  • Meronymic relations make up 52% of bridging cases (187), yet only 38 of these were found in WordNet, even counting inherited links.
  • Associate/Individual, a class absent from earlier literature and based on the target's lexicographic definition, accounts for 17.8%. Circumstantial cases account for 4.7% and world-knowledge cases for 3%.
  • Thematic bridges make up roughly 6% of cases. For 14 of 19 of them, a FrameNet frame contained both anchor and target.
  • Roughly 65% of bridges seem solvable with WordNet, FrameNet or limited lexical reasoning. The annotation tools are being reused on the German NEGRA corpus.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Semantic role labeling

Cited by

9 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 6 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{gardent2003which,
  title = {{Which bridges for bridging definite descriptions?}},
  author = {Gardent, Claire and Manuélian, Hélène and Kow, Eric},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of 4th International Workshop on Linguistically Interpreted Corpora (LINC-03) at EACL 2003},
  year = {2003},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W03-2410/}
}

References

14 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. C. F. Baker, C. J. Fillmore, and J. B. Lowe. 1998. The berkeley framenet project. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Seventeenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics. find our card
  2. C. Beaumont, J. Lecomte, and N. Hatout. 1998. Etiquetage morpho-syntaxique du corpus "le monde" pour les besoins du projet parole. Technical report, INALF, Nancy. find
  3. H. H. Clark. 1977. Bridging. In P. N. Johnson-Laird and P. C. Wason, editors, Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. find
  4. S. Corley, M. Corley, F. Keller, M. W. Crocker, and S. Trewin. 2001. Finding syntactic structure in unparsed corpora: The Gsearch corpus query system. Computers and the Humanities, 35(2):81–94. find
  5. C. Fellbaum, editor. 1998. WordNet. An electronic lexical database. MIT Press, Cambridge/Mass. find
  6. K. Fraurud. 1990. Definiteness and the processing of nps in natural dicourse. Journal of Semantics. find
  7. G. Kleiber. 1997. Des anaphores associatives méro-nymiques aux anaphores associatives locatives, volume 19. Verbum. find
  8. J. Lecomte. 1997. Codage multext-grace pour l’action grace multitag. Technical report, INALF, Nancy. find
  9. G.A. Miller. 1995. Wordnet: a lexical database for english. Communications of the ACM, 38(11). find our card
  10. C. Mueller and M. Strube. 2001. Annotating anaphoric and bridging relations with mmax. In Proceedings of the 2nd SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 90–95, Aalborg, Denmark. find our card
  11. M. Poesio and R. Vieira. 1998. A corpus-based investigation of definite description use. Computational Linguistics, 24(2):183–216. find
  12. W. Skut, B. Krenn, T. Brants, and H. Uszkoreit. 1997. An annotation scheme for free word order languages. In Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing ANLP-97, Washington, DC. find
  13. K. Strand. 1997. A taxonomy of linking relations. find
  14. M. Winston, R. Chaffin, and D. Herrmann. 1987. A taxonomy of part-whole relations. Cognitive Science. find

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/gardent-2003-which-bridges-bridging-definite-descriptions/