Title Can Anaphoric Definite Descriptions be Replaced by Pronouns?
Author(s) Judita Preiss, Caroline Gasperin, Ted Briscoe

University of Cambridge

Session O31-EW
Abstract We investigate the hypothesis that a pronoun is used in discourse, when its antecedent is in the focus of the discourse. We create a corpus of `replaced anaphoric definite descriptions', where occurrences of definite descriptions are replaced with a corresponding pronoun. We use the (Lappin, 1994) anaphora resolution algorithm on the new corpus, and obtain a much lower performance than when the corpus only contains genuine pronouns, thus supporting the hypothesis.
Keyword(s) Definite descriptions, anaphora resolution, pronouns
Language(s) English
Full Paper 718.pdf