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Automatic Recognition of the Function of Singular Neuter Pronouns in Texts and Spoken Data

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Anaphora Processing and Applications (DAARC 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5847))

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Abstract

We describe the results of unsupervised (clustering) and supervised (classification) learning experiments with the purpose of recognising the function of singular neuter pronouns in Danish corpora of written and spoken language. Danish singular neuter pronouns comprise personal and demonstrative pronouns. They are very frequent and have many functions such as non-referential, cataphoric, deictic and anaphoric. The antecedents of discourse anaphoric singular neuter pronouns can be nominal phrases of different gender and number, verbal phrases, adjectival phrases, clauses or discourse segments of different size and they can refer to individual and abstract entities. Danish neuter pronouns occur in more constructions and have different distributions than the corresponding English pronouns it, this and that. The results of the classification experiments show a significant improvement of the performance with respect to the baseline in all types of data. The best results were obtained on text data, while the worst results were achieved on free-conversational, multi-party dialogues.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Language Technology, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 140-142, build. 25, 2300, Copenhagen S, Denmark

    Costanza Navarretta

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  1. Costanza Navarretta
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. AU-KBC Research Centre, MIT Campus of Anna University, Chromepet, Pin 600044, Chennai, India

    Sobha Lalitha Devi

  2. Faculdade de Ciências de Lisboa , , Departamento de Informática, Cidade Universitária, 1749-016, Lisboa, Portugal

    António Branco

  3. Chair of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Studies, University of Wolverhampton, WV1 1SB, Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

    Ruslan Mitkov

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Navarretta, C. (2009). Automatic Recognition of the Function of Singular Neuter Pronouns in Texts and Spoken Data. In: Lalitha Devi, S., Branco, A., Mitkov, R. (eds) Anaphora Processing and Applications. DAARC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5847. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04975-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04975-0_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04974-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04975-0

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