Event versus entity co-reference: Effects of context and form of referring expression

Sharid Loáiciga, Luca Bevacqua, Hannah Rohde, Christian Hardmeier


Abstract
Anaphora resolution systems require both an enumeration of possible candidate antecedents and an identification process of the antecedent. This paper focuses on (i) the impact of the form of referring expression on entity-vs-event preferences and (ii) how properties of the passage interact with referential form. Two crowd-sourced story-continuation experiments were conducted, using constructed and naturally-occurring passages, to see how participants interpret It and This pronouns following a context sentence that makes available event and entity referents. Our participants show a strong, but not categorical, bias to use This to refer to events and It to refer to entities. However, these preferences vary with passage characteristics such as verb class (a proxy in our constructed examples for the number of explicit and implicit entities) and more subtle author intentions regarding subsequent re-mention (the original event-vs-entity re-mention of our corpus items).
Anthology ID:
W18-0711
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Massimo Poesio, Vincent Ng, Maciej Ogrodniczuk
Venue:
CRAC
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
97–103
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0711
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-0711
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sharid Loáiciga, Luca Bevacqua, Hannah Rohde, and Christian Hardmeier. 2018. Event versus entity co-reference: Effects of context and form of referring expression. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference, pages 97–103, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Event versus entity co-reference: Effects of context and form of referring expression (Loáiciga et al., CRAC 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0711.pdf
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