Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding

Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding PDF Author: Francis Cornish
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198700289
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
"This was a different man," said Mr Welbecker. "Listen! This man was called Hamlet and his uncle had killed his father because he wanted to marry his mother.""What did he want to marry his mother for?" said William. "I've never heard of anyone wanting to marry their mother."*In almost any conversation the meaning of what is said depends on the listener seeing how some words refer to what has already been said, and that others must be related to the characteristics of time, place, or person of the situation around which the conversation revolves. These modes ofreference, anaphora and deixis respectively, involve surprisingly complicated cognitive and syntactic processes, which people (normally) perform easily and unerringly. But they present formidable problems for the linguist and cognitive scientist trying to explain precisely how comprehension isachieved. Anaphora and deixis are thus a central research focus in syntactic theory, while understanding and modelling their operation in discourse are important targets in computational linguistics and cognitive science. In this ambitious work, Francis Cornish sets out an original theory ofanaphora and deixis, and proposes a new and elegant theoretical model to represent the transfer of meaning in discourse.Dr Cornish considers anaphoric reference in discourse from both psychological and linguistic perspectives. He argues that anaphora and deixis are essentially parts of integrative discourse procedures that facilitate the linking of representations held in working memory. He brings together work bylinguists, formal semanticists, psychologists, and researchers in artificial intelligence, as well as drawing on his own extensive experimental work on a variety of corpora of different genres in French and English.Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding will interest researchers and advanced students in a variety of fields within and outside linguistics, including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, syntactic theory, formal semantics, and the analysis of discourse.[* from William - The Pirate by Richmal Crompton, London, Macmillan, 1932]

Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding

Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding PDF Author: Francis Cornish
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198700289
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
"This was a different man," said Mr Welbecker. "Listen! This man was called Hamlet and his uncle had killed his father because he wanted to marry his mother.""What did he want to marry his mother for?" said William. "I've never heard of anyone wanting to marry their mother."*In almost any conversation the meaning of what is said depends on the listener seeing how some words refer to what has already been said, and that others must be related to the characteristics of time, place, or person of the situation around which the conversation revolves. These modes ofreference, anaphora and deixis respectively, involve surprisingly complicated cognitive and syntactic processes, which people (normally) perform easily and unerringly. But they present formidable problems for the linguist and cognitive scientist trying to explain precisely how comprehension isachieved. Anaphora and deixis are thus a central research focus in syntactic theory, while understanding and modelling their operation in discourse are important targets in computational linguistics and cognitive science. In this ambitious work, Francis Cornish sets out an original theory ofanaphora and deixis, and proposes a new and elegant theoretical model to represent the transfer of meaning in discourse.Dr Cornish considers anaphoric reference in discourse from both psychological and linguistic perspectives. He argues that anaphora and deixis are essentially parts of integrative discourse procedures that facilitate the linking of representations held in working memory. He brings together work bylinguists, formal semanticists, psychologists, and researchers in artificial intelligence, as well as drawing on his own extensive experimental work on a variety of corpora of different genres in French and English.Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding will interest researchers and advanced students in a variety of fields within and outside linguistics, including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, syntactic theory, formal semantics, and the analysis of discourse.[* from William - The Pirate by Richmal Crompton, London, Macmillan, 1932]

Anaphora

Anaphora PDF Author: Yan Huang
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198235286
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
(Publisher-supplied data) Yan Huang is Reader in Linguistics, Department of Linguistic Science, University of Reading.

Anaphora: Analysis, Algorithms and Applications

Anaphora: Analysis, Algorithms and Applications PDF Author: António Branco
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540714111
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book constitutes revised selected papers of the 6th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium, DAARC 2007, held in Lagos, Portugal in March 2007. The 13 revised full papers are organized in topical sections on human processing and performance, language analysis and representation, resolution methodology and algorithms, as well as computational systems and applications.

Studies in Anaphora

Studies in Anaphora PDF Author: Barbara A. Fox
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027229279
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
The last 15 years has seen an explosion of research on the topic of anaphora. Studies of anaphora have been important to our understanding of cognitive processes, the relationships between social interaction and grammar, and of directionality in diachronic change. The contributions to this volume represent the “next generation” of studies in anaphora — defined broadly as those morpho-syntactic forms available to speakers for formulating reference — taking as their starting point the foundation of research done in the 1980s. These studies examine in detail, and with a richness of methods and theories, what patterns of anaphoric usage can reveal to us about cognition, social interaction, and language change.

Anaphora and Definite Descriptions

Anaphora and Definite Descriptions PDF Author: Jaakko Hintikka
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400954107
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
I n order to appreciate properly what we are doing in this book it is necessary to realize that our approach to linguistic theorizing differs from the prevailing views. Our approach can be described by indicating what distinguishes it from the methodological ideas current in theoretical linguistics, which I consider seriously misguided. Linguists typically construe their task in these days as that of making exceptionless generalizations from particular examples. This explanatory strategy is wrong in several different ways. It presupposes that we can have "intuitions" about particular examples, usually examples invented by the linguist himself or herself, reliable and sharp enough to serve as a basis of sharp generalizations. It also presupposes that we cannot have equally reliable direct access to general linguistic regularities. Both assumptions appear to me extremely dubious, and the first of them has in effect been challenged by linguists like Dwight Bol inger. There is also some evidence that the degree of unanimity among linguists is fairly low when it comes to less clear cases, even in connection with such relatively simple questions as grammaticality (acceptability). For this reason we have tried to rely more on quotations from contemporary fiction, newspapers and magazines than on linguists' and philosophers' ad hoc examples. I also find it strange that some of the same linguists as believe that we all possess innate ideas about general characteristics of humanly possible grammars assume that we can have access to them only via their particular consequences.

Corpus-based and Computational Approaches to Discourse Anaphora

Corpus-based and Computational Approaches to Discourse Anaphora PDF Author: Simon Botley
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9781556193972
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Discourse anaphora is a challenging linguistic phenomenon that has given rise to research in fields as diverse as linguistics, computational linguistics and cognitive science. Because of the diversity of approaches these fields bring to the anaphora problem, the editors of this volume argue that there needs to be a synthesis, or at least a principled attempt to draw the differing strands of anaphora research together. The selected papers in this volume all contribute to the aim of synthesis and were selected to represent the growing importance of corpus-based and computational approaches to anaphora description, and to developing natural language systems for resolving anaphora in natural language.

Anaphora Processing

Anaphora Processing PDF Author: António Branco
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027247773
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
Anaphora processing is a central topic in the study of natural language and has long been the object of research in a wide range of disciplines. The correct interpretation of anaphora has also become increasingly important for real-world natural language processing applications, including machine translation, automatic abstracting, information extraction and question answering. This volume provides a unique overview of the processing of anaphora from a multi- and inter-disciplinary angle. It will be of interest and practical use to readers from fields as diverse as theoretical linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, human language technology, psycholinguistics, cognitive science and translation studies. The readership includes but is not limited to university lecturers, researchers, postgraduate and senior undergraduate students.

Mental Models and the Interpretation of Anaphora

Mental Models and the Interpretation of Anaphora PDF Author: Alan Garnham
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1134951027
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
The interpretation of anaphora - how we interpret expressions such as definite pronouns (he, she, it) and verbal elliptical phrases (such as "did so, too") in the course of ordinary conversation or reading - is an important aspect of language comprehension. In this book the author examines the research and evidence on anaphor interpretation within the context of the mental models theory of comprehension, arguing that the notion of a mental model is essential to the detailed description of the processes of anaphor resolution. The general philosophy of the mental models approach and the nature of mental models themselves and their role in language processing is discussed, followed by a review of methodological issues that bear on the interpretation of psychological research findings. Against this background, the author's own research on areas such as deep and surface anaphora, reference into anaphoric islands, the role of implicit causality in anaphor resolution and the use of pronouns to refer to characters introduced by stereotyped role names is presented. At all times the author's research is set within the context of the general literature on anaphor resolution derived from the disciplines of linguistics, psycholinguistics, philosophy and computational linguistics, ensuring that the book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in these fields.

Anaphora

Anaphora PDF Author: Andrew Barss
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470754621
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Anaphora: A Reference Guide is a collection of essays that report on the major results of recent research in anaphora and set the stage for further inquiry. Reports on the major results of recent research in anaphora and sets the stage for further inquiry. Features contributions from among the world's leading researchers on anaphora. Presents an exciting picture of how broad the phenomenon of anaphora is and how it can reveal many mysterious properties of language. Includes articles of interest to many disciplines, including philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, linguistics, language studies, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics.

Anaphora Resolution

Anaphora Resolution PDF Author: Ruslan Mitkov
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131788180X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Teaching computers to solve language problems is one of the major challenges of natural language processing. There is a large amount of interesting research devoted to this field. This book fills an existing gap in the literature with an up-to-date survey of the field, including the author’s own contributions. A number of different fields overlap in anaphora resolution – computational linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), grammar, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and artificial intelligence. This book begins by introducing basic notions and terminology, moving onto early research methods and approaches, recent developments and applications, and future directions. It addresses various issues related to the practical implementation of anaphora systems, such as rules employed, algorithms implemented or evaluation techniques used. This is an ideal reference book for students and researchers in this particular area of computational linguistics. Since anaphora resolution is vital for the development of any practical NLP system, the book will be of interest to readers from both academia and industry.