What brings a higher-order entity into focus of attention? Sentential pronouns in English and Norwegian.

What it is about

The paper asks which factors decide whether a pronoun refers to a higher-order entity, such as a fact or a situation mentioned in an earlier sentence. Using the Givenness Hierarchy of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski (1993), it argues that English "it" and Norwegian unaccented "det" need their referent to be in focus, while "that" and accented "DET" need only an activated referent. A listening test with 30 Norwegian subjects shows the effect: with unaccented "det", most readers link a following "henne" ("her") to the more distant antecedent, and with accented "DET" to the closer one (for example 23 of 30 against 7 in one text). Reaction times differ by about 600 ms between the two versions. The paper also argues that repeating an implicit content in the second sentence brings it into focus, and that an interviewer's question can make a fact salient without prior mention.

Ideas

• I1. coref/src/sieve.rs: add a pass for sentential pronouns (an "it" or "that" whose antecedent is a clause, not a noun phrase). The candidates are clause-level events from prag/src/frames.rs, ranked by the focus rule (the subject of the last matrix clause). Measure on a hand-written set of sentential pronoun cases, with a control where noun candidates are ranked first, which must score lower.
• I2. Feature for coref/src/mention.rs: mark "it" and "that" as focus-tracking and activation-only forms, and let the feature block the link when the candidate is not the last topic. Measure with coref CoNLL F1 on the subset of pronouns.
• I3. world/src/narr.rs: an implicit object repeated from an earlier clause (the paper's "answer" = "answer Gro's question") raises the focus of its content. Add a rule that re-activates an event when a later clause elides its argument, and test it on a short story set.

For Mova

The English chapter is 35. Reference and coreference, with 36. Discourse relations and coherence for the focus effects. The code is coref/src/sieve.rs and coref/src/mention.rs, plus event structure in world/src/narr.rs. The measures are coref F1 on a held-out set of sentential pronouns and a reversal control. The Norwegian experiment is for context only; its reaction-time evidence cannot be reused without a new experiment.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/1598819.1598832

@inproceedings{borthen1997what,
  title = {{What brings a higher-order entity into focus of attention? Sentential pronouns in English and Norwegian.}},
  author = {Borthen, Kaja and Fretheim, Thorstein},
  booktitle = {Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution for Unrestricted Texts},
  year = {1997},
  doi = {10.3115/1598819.1598832},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1598819.1598832}
}

References

11 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Ariel, Mira (1988) "Referring and accessibility." Journal of Linguistics 24. 67-87. find
2. Fmurud, Karl (1992) Processing Noun Phrases in Natural Discourse. Ph.D. Thesis. Stockholm University, Dept. of Linguistics. find
3. Fretheim, Thorstein (1997) "Accented and Unaccented Situation Anaphom: do they work the way we expect them to?" Paper presented at the conference on Grammatik i Fokus, Lund, February 6, 1997. find
4. Fretheim, Thorstein & Kaja Borthen (1996) "Some unexpected determinants of local refematial (dis)continuity" in S. Bofley et al., eds. Approaches to Discourse Resolution Colloquium (DAARC96), Lancaster. find
5. Fretheim, Thorstein & Kaja Borthen (1997) "Linguistic Constraints on Relevance in Reference Resolution." To appear in Proceedings of the 1997 Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. find
6. Garrod, S. C., andA. J. Sandford(1982) "The Mental Representation of Discourse in a Focussed Memory System: Implications for the Interpretation of Anaphofie Noun Phrases." Journal of Semantics 1. 21-41. find
7. Gfice, H. P. (1975) "Logic andConversation." In P. Cole andJ.L. Morgan, eds., Syntax and Semantics 3. Speech Acts. 41-58, i. find
8. Grosz, Barbara J., Aravind K. Joshi, & Scott Weinstein (1986) 'Towards a Computational Theory of Discourse Interpretation." Unpubfished ms. find
9. Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski (1993) "Cognitive Status and the Form of Referring Expressions in Discourse." l~nL, uage 69. 274-307. find
10. Gundel, Jeanette K. (1997) "Centering Theory and the Givenness Hierarchy: Towards a Synthesis." In A. Joshi, E. F. Prince and M. Walker, eds. Centering Theory in Discourse. Oxford University Press. find
11. Walker, Marilyn A. & Ellen F. Prince (1996) "A Bilateral Approach to Giveuness: A Hearer-Status Algorithm and a Centering Algorithm." In T. Fretheim and J. K. Gundel, eds. Reference and Referent Accessibility. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. find

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