A Framework for Interpreting Bridging Anaphora

In this paper we present a novel framework for resolving bridging anaphora. We argue that anaphora, particularly bridging anaphora, is used as a shortcut device similar to the use of compound nouns. Hence, the two natural language usage phenomena would have to be based on the same theoretical framework. We use an existing theory on compound nouns to test its validity for anaphora usages. To do this, we used human annotators to interpret indirect anaphora from naturally occurring discourses. The annotators were asked to classify the relations between anaphor-antecedent pairs into relation types that have been previously used to describe the relations between a modifier and the head noun of a compound noun. We obtained very encouraging results with an average Fleiss’s κ value of 0.66 for inter-annotation agreement. The results were evaluated against other similar natural language interpretation annotation experiments and were found to compare well.

[1]  Roxana Girju,et al.  Improving the Interpretation of Noun Phrases with Cross-linguistic Information , 2007, ACL.

[2]  Eduard H. Hovy,et al.  A Taxonomy, Dataset, and Classifier for Automatic Noun Compound Interpretation , 2010, ACL.

[3]  Pamela A. Downing On the Creation and Use of English Compound Nouns. , 1977 .

[4]  Preslav Nakov,et al.  Large-Scale Noun Compound Interpretation Using Bootstrapping and the Web as a Corpus , 2011, EMNLP.

[5]  Beatrice Warren,et al.  Semantic patterns of noun-noun compounds , 1978 .

[6]  Mark Lauer,et al.  Corpus Statistics Meet the Noun Compound: Some Empirical Results , 1995, ACL.

[7]  Kam-Fai Wong,et al.  Natural Language Processing - IJCNLP 2005, Second International Joint Conference, Jeju Island, Korea, October 11-13, 2005, Proceedings , 2005, IJCNLP.

[8]  Roger K. Moore Computer Speech and Language , 1986 .

[9]  Ellen Riloff,et al.  Corpus-Based Identification of Non-Anaphoric Noun Phrases , 1999, ACL.

[10]  Carlo Strapparava,et al.  Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation , 2010 .

[11]  Dan I. Moldovan,et al.  On the semantics of noun compounds , 2005, Comput. Speech Lang..

[12]  Leo G. M. Noordman,et al.  Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations , 1992 .

[13]  Timothy Baldwin,et al.  Interpreting Semantic Relations in Noun Compounds via Verb Semantics , 2006, ACL.

[14]  Karl E. Zimmer,et al.  Some General Observations about Nominal Compounds. Working Papers on Language Universals, No. 5. , 1971 .

[15]  Renata Vieira,et al.  An Empirically-based System for Processing Definite Descriptions , 2000, CL.

[16]  V SXW6Y,et al.  Resolving Bridging References in Unrestricted Text , 1997 .

[17]  Stan Szpakowicz,et al.  Learning Noun-Modifier Semantic Relations with Corpus-based and WordNet-based Features , 2006, AAAI.

[18]  Kari Fraurud,et al.  Definiteness and the Processing of Noun Phrases in Natural Discourse , 1990, J. Semant..

[19]  Stan Szpakowicz,et al.  Semi-Automatic Recognition of Noun Modifier Relationships , 1998, ACL.

[20]  Mark Davies The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) , 2012 .

[21]  Christiane Fellbaum,et al.  Book Reviews: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database , 1999, CL.

[22]  Jerry R. Hobbs Coherence and Coreference , 1979, Cogn. Sci..

[23]  Tony Veale,et al.  A Concept-Centered Approach to Noun-Compound Interpretation , 2008, COLING.

[24]  Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha Annotating and Learning Compound Noun Semantics , 2007, ACL.

[25]  Timothy Baldwin,et al.  Automatic Interpretation of Noun Compounds Using WordNet Similarity , 2005, IJCNLP.

[26]  Judith N. Levi,et al.  The syntax and semantics of complex nominals , 1978 .

[27]  Razvan C. Bunescu,et al.  Associative Anaphora Resolution: A Web-Based Approach , 2003 .

[28]  Mirella Lapata,et al.  Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2008) , 2008 .

[29]  Preslav Nakov Noun Compound Interpretation Using Paraphrasing Verbs: Feasibility Study , 2008, AIMSA.

[30]  Simone Teufel,et al.  Resolving bridging references in unrestricted text , 1997 .