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A Corpus-based Investigation of Definite Description Use

Summary

Annotating corpora with how definite descriptions (noun phrases with "the") are interpreted is needed for MUC-style system evaluation. However, nobody had checked whether people without linguistic training can apply the existing classification schemes reliably. Poesio and Vieira tested this in two annotation experiments. Untrained subjects labelled every definite description in 33 randomly chosen Wall Street Journal articles from the Penn Treebank, 1,412 definites in all. When a subject judged a description to be linked to earlier text, they also marked its antecedent. The labels came from schemes adapted from Hawkins's and Prince's taxonomies. Inter-annotator agreement was measured with the kappa statistic. With these detailed schemes, agreement was only moderate (K = 0.63). It rose to K = 0.76 with Fraurud's simpler two-class split into first-mention and subsequent-mention. Annotators also sometimes chose different antecedents. About half of the definites introduced new entities rather than pointing back to earlier ones. The results cast doubt on scoring systems against one standardized human annotation. The study also produced data for building automatic resolvers of definite descriptions.

Key points

  • Data: 33 Wall Street Journal articles (ACL/DCI CD-ROM, all in the Penn Treebank) containing 1,412 definite descriptions. The authors chose written news text to avoid deictic uses and the repair phenomena found in spoken corpora such as MapTask or TRAINS.
  • Agreement was K = 0.63 with schemes based on Hawkins (1978) and Prince (1981, 1992), and K = 0.76 with Fraurud's binary first-mention / subsequent-mention scheme.
  • Annotators did not fully agree on which antecedent an anaphoric definite refers to.
  • In one experiment, about 50% of definites were labelled discourse-new, 30% anaphoric and 18% associative/bridging.
  • Some definites seemed to be understood without being fully disambiguated. This challenges theories that assume each definite resolves to exactly one referent.

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: Natural language processing

Topics: Coreference resolution

Cited by

86 papers of our library cite it (of the 140884 whose bibliographies we read); 37 of them have a page here, 49 not yet.

Cite

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

@article{poesio1998corpus,
  title = {{A Corpus-based Investigation of Definite Description Use}},
  author = {Poesio, Massimo and Vieira, Renata},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1998},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J98-2001/}
}

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