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Abstract Coreference in a Multilingual Perspective: a View on Czech and German

Summary

The paper looks at abstract coreference, where an anaphor points to a verbal phrase, clause, sentence or longer passage rather than to a noun phrase. It compares Czech (Slavic) and German (Germanic), a language pair that earlier studies, mostly monolingual and English-centred, had not examined. The authors built comparable samples of essays on economic, political and social topics. The German texts come from the CroCo corpus and the Czech texts from the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT 3.0). The two resources use different annotation frameworks, but both record antecedent scope and anaphor type. Both languages contain a similar number of abstract anaphors, yet they differ in how these are used. German tends to refer to single sentences and relies heavily on demonstrative heads such as dies and on pronominal adverbs. Czech more often refers to longer passages and also uses bare noun phrases. The authors relate these preferences to typological differences, such as the lack of articles and pro-drop in Czech. They argue the findings matter for contrastive linguistics, translation studies and machine translation.

Key points

  • Data: The German sample has 8 CroCo texts (12,243 tokens, 645 sentences). The Czech sample has 15 PDT 3.0 texts (11,399 tokens, 628 sentences).
  • Totals and antecedent scope: There are 68 abstract anaphors in German and 63 in Czech.
    • About 66% of German cases refer to one sentence.
    • About 48% of Czech cases refer to segments longer than a sentence. This may partly reflect annotation practice.
  • Anaphor types:
    • Demonstrative heads account for about 65% of abstract anaphors in German and about 44% in Czech.
    • Bare NPs make up about 16% in Czech and do not occur at all in German.
  • Demonstratives: 72% of German demonstrative heads refer to abstract entities, compared with 39% in Czech. Czech compensates with demonstrative-modified NPs.
  • Distance: In every observed case, the anaphor appears in the segment immediately after its antecedent. The authors propose checking translated texts and other genres in future work.

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: Coreference resolution

Cited by

5 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 1 of them have a page here, 4 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/w16-0707

@inproceedings{nedoluzhko2016abstract,
  title = {{Abstract Coreference in a Multilingual Perspective: a View on Czech and German}},
  author = {Nedoluzhko, Anna and Lapshinova-Koltunski, Ekaterina},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Coreference Resolution Beyond OntoNotes (CORBON 2016)},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/w16-0707},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w16-0707}
}

References

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