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Abstract Anaphora Resolution in Danish

Summary

The paper tackles pronouns and demonstratives in spoken Danish dialogue that point to abstract entities such as propositions, events or facts, as well as to ordinary noun-phrase referents. Navarretta first describes how Danish third-person pronouns and demonstratives behave, especially the deictic det, using examples from three dialogue collections (Bysoc, SL, PID). She then ports Eckert and Strube's ES99 algorithm from English to Danish. The algorithm decides whether an anaphor is individual, discourse-deictic or vague by looking at its predicative context, through I-incompatible and A-incompatible predicates. Individual anaphors are then resolved with Strube's functional centering (S-list), and abstract ones with an A-list combined with right-frontier constraints.

The Danish version adds more predicates, because det appears in more contexts than English it/this/that. It also widens the search window for individual antecedents. Manual tests on four dialogues gave precision somewhat above the English figures. This suggests the approach carries over across languages, although the evaluation relied on only one annotator.

Key points

  • Test data: three randomly chosen dialogues from "Samtale hos Lægen" (SL; 6,305 words) and one dialogue between native Danes from "Projekt Indvandrerdansk" (PID; 5,367 words). The author alone annotated dialogue acts, NPs, anaphor classes and antecedents.
  • Individual anaphors: 134 of 180 resolved correctly, a precision of 0.744. Per-dialogue precision ranged from 0.676 to 0.833. Without the extended resolution scope, precision was 64.5%. A cache model was used, and antecedents were found at most seven Synchronizing Units back.
  • Discourse deictics: 147 of 211 resolved correctly, a precision of 0.696. Per-dialogue precision ranged from 0.489 to 0.846. For comparison, ES99 report 63.6% for deictics and 66.2% for individual anaphors in English.
  • Main error source: vague anaphors were treated as discourse deictics. Other errors came from missing lexical information about abstract nominals, generic det, plural pronouns with complex or absent antecedents, and chaining errors involving parenthetical utterances.
  • Proposed future work: add richer lexical knowledge and study how discourse deictics relate to discourse relations, in both written texts and dialogues.

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

7 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 5 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/1117736.1117743

@inproceedings{navarretta2000abstract,
  title = {{Abstract Anaphora Resolution in Danish}},
  author = {Navarretta, Costanza},
  booktitle = {1st SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue},
  year = {2000},
  doi = {10.3115/1117736.1117743},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1117736.1117743}
}

References

21 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  4. Paul Diderichsen. 1984-1946. Elementa;r Dansk Grammatik. Gyldendal, Copenhagen. find
  5. Miriam Eckert and Michael Strube. 1999a. Dialogue Acts, Syncchronising Units and Anaphora Resolution. In Jan van Kuppevelt, Robert van Leusen, Robert van Rooy, and Henk Zeevat, editors , Amstelogue '99 Proceedings - Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. find
  6. Miriam Eckert and Michael Strube. 1999b. Resolving Discourse Deictic Anaphora in Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics, pages 37--44. find our card
  7. Kari Fraurud. 1992. Processing Noun Phrases in Natural Discourse. Department of Linguistics - " Stockholm University. find
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  9. Barbara Grosz, Aravind K. Joshi, and Scott Weinstein. 1995. Centering:A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse. Computational L inguistics~ 21(2):203-225. find our card
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  11. Megumi Kameyama. 1998. Intrasentential centering: A case study. In Marilyn A. Walker, Aravind K. Joshi, and Ellen F Prince, editors, Centering Theory in Discourse, pages 89--112. Oxford University Press. Andrew Kehler. 1 9 9 7 . Current Theories of Centering for Pronoun Interpretation: A critical Evaluation. Computational Linguistics, 23 (3) :467-475. ↗
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  13. Costanza Navarretta. 2000. Centering-based Anaphora Resolution in Danish. In Petr Sojka, Ivan Kopecek, and Karel Pala, editors, Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Text, Speech, Dialogue TSD 2000, pages 345-350, Brno, Czech Republic. - Anne Neville. 1998. Subject-orientedness and Exempt Anaphors. In Proceedings of the Xth Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics University of Iceland, Reykjavik. find
  14. Bolette S. Pedersen and Sanni Nimb. 2000. Semantic Encoding of Danish Verbs in SIMPLE - Adapting a verb-framed model to a satellite-framed language. In Proceeding from Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation - LREC 2000, Athens. find
  15. Livia Polanyi. 1988. A Formal Model of the Structure of Discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 12(5/6):601-638. ↗
  16. Ellen F. Prince. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Peter Cole, editor, Radical Pragmatics, pages 223-255. Academic Press. find
  17. Michael Strube and Udo Hahn. 1996. Functional Centering. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting, pages 270-277. Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  18. Michael Strube and Udo Hahn. 1999. Functional Centering - Grounding Referential Coherence in Information Structure. Computational Linguistics, 25(3):309-344. find our card
  19. Michael Strube. 1998. Never Look Back: An Alternative to Centering. In Praeeedings of the 36th Annual Meeting, volume II, pages 1251-1257. Association for Computational Linguistics. ↗
  20. Enric Vallduv~ and Elisabet Engdahl. 1995. The linguistic realization of information packaging. Linguistics, 34(3):459-519. find
  21. Marilyn A. Walker. 1998. Centering, Anaphora Resolution, and Discourse Structure. In Marilyn A. Walker, Aravind K. Joshi, and Ellen F. Prince, editors, Centering Theory in Discourse. Oxford University Press. Bonnie L. Webber. 1 9 9 1 . Structure and Ostension in the Interpretation of Discourse Deixis. Natural Language and Cognitive Processes, 6(2):107-135. ↗

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