Anaphora Processing

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.

Distribution of anaphora in natural language and the complexity of its resolution have resulted in a wide range of disciplines focusing their research on this grammatical phenomenon. It has emerged as one of the most productive topics of multi- and int- disciplinary research such as cognitive science, artificial intelligence and human language technology, theoretical, cognitive, corpus and computational linguistics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. Anaphora plays a major role in understanding a language and also accounts for the cohesion of a text. Correct interpretation of anaphora is necessary in all high-level natural language pr- essing applications. Given the growing importance of the study of anaphora in the last few decades, it has emerged as the frontier area of research. This is evident from the high-quality th submissions received for the 7 DAARC from where the 10 excellent reports on - search findings are selected for this volume. These are the regular papers that were presented at DAARC.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium, DAARC 2011, held in Faro, Portugal, in October 2011. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computational resolution methodology and systems; language analysis and representation; and human processing and performance.

This book lays out a path leading from the linguistic and cognitive basics, to classical rule-based and machine learning algorithms, to today’s state-of-the-art approaches, which use advanced empirically grounded techniques, automatic knowledge acquisition, and refined linguistic modeling to make a real difference in real-world applications. Anaphora and coreference resolution both refer to the process of linking textual phrases (and, consequently, the information attached to them) within as well as across sentence boundaries, and to the same discourse referent. The book offers an overview of recent research advances, focusing on practical, operational approaches and their applications. In part I (Background), it provides a general introduction, which succinctly summarizes the linguistic, cognitive, and computational foundations of anaphora processing and the key classical rule- and machine-learning-based anaphora resolution algorithms. Acknowledging the central importance of shared resources, part II (Resources) covers annotated corpora, formal evaluation, preprocessing technology, and off-the-shelf anaphora resolution systems. Part III (Algorithms) provides a thorough description of state-of-the-art anaphora resolution algorithms, covering enhanced machine learning methods as well as techniques for accomplishing important subtasks such as mention detection and acquisition of relevant knowledge. Part IV (Applications) deals with a selection of important anaphora and coreference resolution applications, discussing particular scenarios in diverse domains and distilling a best-practice model for systematically approaching new application cases. In the concluding part V (Outlook), based on a survey conducted among the contributing authors, the prospects of the research field of anaphora processing are discussed, and promising new areas of interdisciplinary cooperation and emerging application scenarios are identified. Given the book’s design, it can be used both as an accompanying text for advanced lectures in computational linguistics, natural language engineering, and computer science, and as a reference work for research and independent study. It addresses an audience that includes academic researchers, university lecturers, postgraduate students, advanced undergraduate students, industrial researchers, and software engineers.

Research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has rapidly advanced in recent years, resulting in exciting algorithms for sophisticated processing of text and speech in various languages. Much of this work focuses on English; in this book we address another group of interesting and challenging languages for NLP research: the Semitic languages. The Semitic group of languages includes Arabic (206 million native speakers), Amharic (27 million), Hebrew (7 million), Tigrinya (6.7 million), Syriac (1 million) and Maltese (419 thousand). Semitic languages exhibit unique morphological processes, challenging syntactic constructions and various other phenomena that are less prevalent in other natural languages. These challenges call for unique solutions, many of which are described in this book. The 13 chapters presented in this book bring together leading scientists from several universities and research institutes worldwide. While this book devotes some attention to cutting-edge algorithms and techniques, its primary purpose is a thorough explication of best practices in the field. Furthermore, every chapter describes how the techniques discussed apply to Semitic languages. The book covers both statistical approaches to NLP, which are dominant across various applications nowadays and the more traditional, rule-based approaches, that were proven useful for several other application domains. We hope that this book will provide a "one-stop-shop'' for all the requisite background and practical advice when building NLP applications for Semitic languages.

Distribution of anaphora in natural language and the complexity of its resolution have resulted in a wide range of disciplines focusing their research on this grammatical phenomenon. It has emerged as one of the most productive topics of multi- and int- disciplinary research such as cognitive science, artificial intelligence and human language technology, theoretical, cognitive, corpus and computational linguistics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. Anaphora plays a major role in understanding a language and also accounts for the cohesion of a text. Correct interpretation of anaphora is necessary in all high-level natural language pr- essing applications. Given the growing importance of the study of anaphora in the last few decades, it has emerged as the frontier area of research. This is evident from the high-quality th submissions received for the 7 DAARC from where the 10 excellent reports on - search findings are selected for this volume. These are the regular papers that were presented at DAARC.

This book presents the results of three experimental studies focusing on the ability of people with dyslexia to resolve ambiguous anaphoric sentences where concrete and abstract referents are present. Each study represents a step in the ongoing investigation of this issue, and stems from questions left unanswered by previous research. This work is primarily inspired by the desire to gain a better understanding of the role of syntactic and lexical knowledge in text comprehension, and, more specifically, of the effects of word concreteness and abstractness in anaphora resolution contexts for readers with dyslexia. The book also investigates the resources necessary to process ambiguous anaphoric sentences. The innovative methodology implemented here comprises both experimental techniques (such as eye-tracking) and the use of questionnaires and standardised tests to answer specific research questions. It also puts forward a hypothesis that explains the different deficits manifesting in people with dyslexia, and suggests that, in reading comprehension tasks, the known impairment in people with dyslexia’s working memory may hinder their ability to efficiently and accurately perform tasks involving procedural memory resources. As a consequence, this impairment would emerge as disruptions of people with dyslexia’s semantic and syntactic competence, as well as their functioning in complex tasks which are particularly demanding in terms of working memory resources.

This book covers anaphora resolution for the English language from a linguistic and computational point of view. First, a definition of anaphors that applies to linguistics as well as information technology is given. On this foundation, all types of anaphors and their characteristics for English are outlined. To examine how frequent each type of anaphor is, a corpus of different hypertexts has been established and analysed with regard to anaphors. The most frequent type are non-finite clause anaphors - a type which has never been investigated so far. Therefore, the potential of non-finite clause anaphors are further explored with respect to anaphora resolution. After presenting the fundamentals of computational anaphora resolution and its application in text retrieval, rules for resolving non-finite clause anaphors are established. Therefore, this book shows that a truly interdisciplinary approach can achieve results which would not have been possible otherwise.