Anaphora Resolution and Underspecification

A project funded by the EPSRC, grant number GR/S76434/01

Project description

• Objective
  • To study the cases of anaphoric reference most problematic for current anaphora resolution systems, in particular:
    • Reference to plurals
    • Reference to abstract objects such as events and plans
    • Ambiguous anaphoric expressions
• Methods
  • Corpus analysis and annotation (University of Essex)
    • Identify questions to be studied through psychological studies
    • Produce an annotated corpus
  • Psychological experiments (University of Glasgow)
    • Provide empirical evidence to be used to modify our existing anaphora resolution system, which will be evaluated using the annotated corpus
• Theoretical goals
  • Revise current models of the interpretation of plurals and events
  • Develop a model of reference to plans
  • Evaluate hypotheses about underspecification in reference to structured objects
  • Yield a better understanding of the phenomenon of (semantic) underspecification

People

At the University of Glasgow, department of Psychology:

• Tony Sanford
• Patrick Sturt (now at Edinburgh)
• Ruth Filik

At the University of Essex, department of Computer Science:

• Massimo Poesio
• Ron Artstein (now at ICT)

Publications

Journal articles

• Ron Artstein and Massimo Poesio.
  Inter-coder agreement for computational linguistics. (PDF, 41 pages)
  Survey article, to appear in Computational Linguistics.

  An extended version (PDF, 66 pages) was not reviewed due to its length.

• Ruth Filik and Anthony J. Sanford.
  When is cataphoric reference recognised?
  Cognition, in press.
• Ruth Filik, Anthony J. Sanford, and Hartmut Leuthold.
  Processing pronouns without antecedents: Evidence from event-related brain potentials.
  Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, in press.
• Anthony J. Sanford, Ruth Filik, Catherine Emmott, and Lorna Morrow.
  They’re digging up the road again: The processing cost of Institutional They.
  Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 61(3): 372-380, 2008.
• Anthony J. Sanford and Ruth Filik.
  “They” as a gender-unspecified singular pronoun: Eye tracking reveals a processing cost.
  Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 60(2): 171-178, 2007.
• Josef Steinberger, Massimo Poesio, Mijail A. Kabadjov and Karel Ježek.
  Two uses of anaphora resolution in summarization.
  Information Processing and Management 43(6): 1663-1680, 2007.
• Massimo Poesio, Patrick Sturt, Ron Artstein, and Ruth Filik.
  Underspecification and Anaphora: Theoretical Issues and Preliminary Evidence.
  Discourse Processes 42(2): 157-175, 2006. PDF preprint (150K)

Conference papers and presentations

• Massimo Poesio and Ron Artstein.
  Anaphoric annotation in the ARRAU corpus. (PDF)
  LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco, May 2008.
• Ron Artstein and Massimo Poesio.
  The Arrau corpus of anaphoric relations. (PDF slides)
  American Association for Corpus Linguistics, Provo, Utah, March 2008.
• Ruth Filik and Anthony J. Sanford.
  When is cataphoric reference recognised?
  17th annual meeting of the Society for Text & Discourse, Glasgow, Scotland, July 2007.
• Ruth Filik and Anthony J. Sanford.
  When is cataphoric reference recognised? (Poster)
  Joint meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society and the Psychonomic Society, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 2007.
• Ruth Filik, Anthony J. Sanford, and Hartmut Leuthold.
  Processing pronouns without antecedents: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. (Poster)
  Annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, New York, May 2007.
• Ron Artstein.
  Identifying referents through annotation of dialogue transcripts. (PDF slides)
  Workshop on Incrementality and Clarification in Dialogue, Kings College London, February 2007.
• Ron Artstein and Massimo Poesio.
  Identifying reference to abstract objects in dialogue. (PDF)
  brandial 2006 proceedings, Potsdam, Germany, September 2006.
• Ruth Filik, Anthony J. Sanford, Catherine Emmott, and Lorna Morrow.
  Pronouns without antecedents: The processing cost of “institutional they”. (Poster – PDF abstract)
  The 19th Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, New York, March 2006.
• Ruth Filik, Anthony J. Sanford, Patrick Sturt, and Massimo Poesio.
  Underspecification in anaphoric reference to structured entities. (Abstract) (PDF slides)
  AMLaP 2005, Ghent, Belgium, September 2005.
• Ruth Filik, Anthony J. Sanford, Patrick Sturt, and Massimo Poesio.
  Underspecification in anaphoric reference to structured entities. (PDF poster)
  13th European Conference on Eye Movements, Bern, Switzerland, August 2005.
• Ron Artstein and Massimo Poesio.
  Bias decreases in proportion to the number of annotators. (PDF)
  Proceedings of FG-MoL 2005, pages 141-150. Edinburgh, Scotland, August 2005.
• Massimo Poesio and Ron Artstein.
  Annotating (anaphoric) ambiguity. (PDF)
  Corpus linguistics, Birmingham, England, July 2005.
• Massimo Poesio and Ron Artstein.
  The reliability of anaphoric annotation, reconsidered: Taking ambiguity into account. (PDF)
  Proceedings of the Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation II: Pie in the Sky, pages 76-83. Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 2005.
• Ruth Filik, Anthony J. Sanford, Patrick Sturt, and Massimo Poesio.
  Underspecification in anaphoric reference to structured entities. (Poster)
  The 18th Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Tucson, Arizona, March 2005.

Technical reports

• Massimo Poesio, Patrick Sturt, Ron Artstein, and Ruth Filik.
  Underspecification and Anaphora: Theoretical Issues and Preliminary Evidence.
  Technical report CSM-438, University of Essex Department of Computer Science, October 2005.
  Superseded by journal article Underspecification and Anaphora: Theoretical Issues and Preliminary Evidence, above.
• Ron Artstein and Massimo Poesio.
  Kappa³ = alpha (or beta).
  Technical Report CSM-437, University of Essex Department of Computer Science, September 2005.
  Superseded by journal article Inter-coder agreement for computational linguistics, above.

Past events

• Massimo led and Ron participated in the research workshop Exploiting Lexical and Encyclopedic Resources For Entity Disambiguation at the Summer Workshop on Language Engineering, Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 16 July – 22 August 2007.
• Ron gave a tutorial on Quality control of corpus annotation through reliability measures at ACL 2007, Prague, Czech Republic, 24 June 2007.
• We organised the workshop on Ambiguity in Anaphora at ESSLLI 2006, Málaga, Spain, 7–11 August 2006.

Modified 17 April 2008; maintained by Ron Artstein.

ARRAU

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