Corpus Based And Computational Approaches To Discourse Anaphora

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 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.

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.

CICLing 2001 is the second annual Conference on Intelligent text processing and Computational Linguistics (hence the name CICLing), see www.CICLing.org. It is intended to provide a balanced view of the cutting edge developments in both theoretical foundations of computational linguistics and practice of natural language text processing with its numerous applications. A feature of the CICLing conferences is their wide scope that covers nearly all areas of computational linguistics and all aspects of natural language processing applications. The conference is a forum for dialogue between the specialists working in these two areas. This year our invited speakers were Graeme Hirst (U. Toronto, Canada), Sylvain Kahane (U. Paris 7, France), and Ruslan Mitkov (U. Wolverhampton, UK). They delivered excellent extended lectures and organized vivid discussions. A total of 72 submissions were received, all but very few of surprisingly high quality. After careful reviewing, the Program Committee selected for presentation 53 of them, 41 as full papers and 12 as short papers, by 98 authors from 19 countries: Spain (19 authors), Japan (15), USA (12), France, Mexico (9 each), Sweden (6), Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Russia, United Arab Emirates (3 each), Argentina (2), Bulgaria, The Netherlands, Ukraine, UK, and Uruguay (1 each).

Ruslan Mitkov's highly successful Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics has been substantially revised and expanded in this second edition. Alongside updated accounts of the topics covered in the first edition, it includes 17 new chapters on subjects such as semantic role-labelling, text-to-speech synthesis, translation technology, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, and the application of Natural Language Processing in educational and biomedical contexts, among many others. The volume is divided into four parts that examine, respectively: the linguistic fundamentals of computational linguistics; the methods and resources used, such as statistical modelling, machine learning, and corpus annotation; key language processing tasks including text segmentation, anaphora resolution, and speech recognition; and the major applications of Natural Language Processing, from machine translation to author profiling. The book will be an essential reference for researchers and students in computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing, as well as those working in related industries.

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.

Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.