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Remarks on Plural Anaphora

Summary

The paper looks at how a plural pronoun such as "they" finds its referent when the earlier text never used a plural phrase. In "Michael met Maria", for example, the pronoun needs a group built from singular mentions. Earlier DRT-style work (Frey & Kamp) let almost any set of discourse markers be merged. The authors argue this is far too permissive. They model discourse referents as reference objects (RefOs) in a referential net (RefN). Groups are formed with Link's sum operation, but only under a constraint called the Common Association Basis (CAB). A CAB is a conceptual link among the candidate members, such as sharing an ontological type or a situation that connects them. Conjunctions, with-PPs and verbs with "grouping force" (strong for meet, weak for watch) signal that such a basis exists. When it does, the group is built while the first sentence is processed and enters the discourse focus together with its atomic parts. As a result, plural pronouns can be resolved by the same focus-based mechanism as singular ones. Further principles narrow the choice when several groups are in focus.

Key points

  • The core constraint is Herweg's Principle of Connectedness: every sub-RefO of a complex RefO must be linked by a CAB. The CAB extends Lang's Common Integrator from coordination theory.
  • Contrasting examples show the effect:
    • In "with their frisbee", the frisbee is left out of the group.
    • With meet, the subject tends to join the group.
    • With watch, the observer stays separate because the verb is dissociative.
  • Early construction of groups is favoured over waiting for the anaphor. Delaying would make plural and singular resolution work in fundamentally different ways.
  • The principles of Permanence and Maximality are proposed for plural anaphora specifically. A conflict-resolution strategy is still needed when they leave more than one candidate.
  • The RefN and sum formation were being implemented in Quintus-PROLOG on a MicroVax, with texts converted to nets by hand. The work was funded by the DFG (grant Ha 1237/2-1) within the GAP project at Universität Hamburg.

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: Discourse analysis · Coreference resolution

Cited by

13 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 5 of them have a page here, 8 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{eschenbach1989remarks,
  title = {{Remarks on Plural Anaphora}},
  author = {Eschenbach, Carola and Habel, Christopher and Herweg, Michael and Rehkamper, Klaus},
  booktitle = {Fourth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1989},
  doi = {10.3115/976815.976837},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/976815.976837}
}

References

16 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Allen, James F. (1987): Natural Language Understanding. Benjamin/Cummings: Menlo Park, Ca. find
  2. Bosch, Peter (1987): Representation and Accessibility of Discourse Referents. IBM Stuttgart. (Lilog Report No. 24) 1 6 6 - Charniak, Eugene (1976): Inference and Knowledge, part 1. in: E. Charniak & Y. Wilks (eds.): Computational Semantics. find
  3. North Holland: Amsterdam, 1-21. Clark, Herbert H. (1975): Bridging. in P . N . Johnson-Laird & P. Wason (eds.): Thinking. Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 411-420. find
  4. Eschenbach, Carola (1988): SRL als Rahmen eines textverarbeitenden Systems. find
  5. GAP-Arbeitspapier 3. Univ. Hamburg. Frey, Werner & Kamp, Hans (1986): Plural Anaphora and Plural Determiners. find
  6. Ms., Univ. Stuttgart. Garrod, Simon C. & Sanford, Antony J. (1982): The Mental Representation of Discourse in a Focussed Memory System: Implications for the Interpretation of Anaphoric Noun Phrases. Journal of Semantics 1, 21-41. find
  7. Grosz, Barbara & Sidner, Candace (1986): Attentions, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse. Computational Linguistics 12, 175-204. find
  8. Guindon, Raymonde (1985): Anaphora Resolution: Short-term memory and focusing. 23rd Annual Meeting ACL, 218-227 Habel, Christopher (1982): Referential Nets with Attributes. in: Proceedings of COLING-82, 101-106. find
  9. Habel, Christopher (1986a): Prinzipien der Referentialit~it. find
  10. Springer: Berlin. Habel, Christopher (1986b): Plurals, Cardinalities, and Structures of Determination. in: Proceedings of COLING-86. 62-64. find
  11. Herweg, Michael (1988): Ans~itze zu einer semantischen und pragmatischen Theorie der Interpretation pluraler Anaphern. GAP-Arbeitspapier 2. find
  12. Univ. Hamburg. Kamp, Hans (1984): A Theory of Truth and Semantic Interpretation. in: Groenendijk, J. et al. (eds.): Truth, Interpretation and Information. Dordrecht: Foris, 1-41 (GRASS 2). find
  13. Lang, Ewald (1984): The Semantics of Coordination. find
  14. John Benjamins: Amsterdam. Link, Godehard (1983): The Logical Analysis of Plurals and Mass Terms: A ~_~ Lattice-theoretical Approach. in: R. B~iuerle et al. (eds.): Meaning, Use, and Interpretation of Language. Berlin: de Gruyter, 302-323. find
  15. Mtisseler, Jochen & Rickheit, Gert (1989): Komplexbildung in der Textverar-beitung: Die kognitive Aufl6sung pluraler Pronomen. DFG-Projekt "Inferenzprozesse beim kognitiven Aufbau sprachlich angeregter mentaler Modelle", KoLiBri-Arbeits-bericht Nr. 17, Univ. find
  16. Bielefeld. Webber, Bonnie L. (1979): A Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora. Garland: New York. - 167- find

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