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Focusing for Interpretation of Pronouns

Paper · 1981 · Candace L. Sidner

Summary

Sidner addresses how a listener or a program works out what a pronoun stands for. She argues that the classic notion of an "antecedent" is flawed. Words do not point to other words, and a pronoun may denote something no earlier phrase literally names. Her example is "they" denoting Harley 1200 bikes as a class after only one specific bike was mentioned. She replaces antecedence with specification (a phrase picks out a cognitive or database element) and co-specification (two phrases pick out the same element). On this basis she builds a focusing theory. The discourse tracks a current actor focus and discourse focus, plus potential foci and a stack of earlier foci. Ordered rules then propose candidate interpretations, and a method called constraint checking tests them using syntactic, semantic and inferential knowledge, which keeps inference bounded. The result is a rule-governed account of both correct readings and comprehension failures. The work is purely theoretical and computational, with no corpus evaluation, and it laid groundwork for later focus- and centering-based anaphora resolution.

Key points

  • Published in Computational Linguistics (1981) by Candace L. Sidner of Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. The work was partly done at the MIT AI Laboratory with ARPA funding.
  • It introduces specification and co-specification as alternatives to co-reference. This lets relations between mental representations be modelled computationally.
  • The focus structures it uses are:
    • actor focus;
    • discourse focus;
    • potential actor foci;
    • potential discourse foci;
    • a focus stack searched last-in, first-out.
  • Separate ordered rule sets cover agent-position and non-agent-position pronouns. They include:
    • a recency rule;
    • a theme rule;
    • a potential actor ambiguity condition;
    • plural rules;
    • a focus-related item rule;
    • a closure rule that flags forward co-specifiers or "missing co-specifier" cases.
  • The theory is claimed to be both predictive, by separating acceptable from odd pronoun uses, and explanatory. The author also acknowledges limits, such as the lack of a syntactic theory of forward co-specification.

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, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

Cite

Cite as Candace L. Sidner. 1981. Focusing for Interpretation of Pronouns. Computational Linguistics.

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

@article{sidner1981focusing,
  title = {{Focusing for Interpretation of Pronouns}},
  author = {Candace L. Sidner},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1981},
  doi = {10.5555/972911.972912},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5555/972911.972912}
}

References

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