An Empirical Investigation of the Relation Between Coreference and Quotations: Can a Pronoun Located in Quotations Find Its Referent?

Many reference resolution studies omit anaphoric forms found in quotations, assuming that they may need special handling as there is insufficient discourse context to determine the referent. This paper reports on an empirical study performed to evaluate this assumption. Specifically, the study addresses the following questions: Are anaphoric expressions found in quotations sufficiently different to justify ignoring them, and is there enough context available for a system to determine the referents of anaphoric expressions found within quoted text? The current study focuses on the pronoun it within the Givenness Hierarchy framework of Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski [13]. We find that this framework can be used in most cases to locate the antecedent for referential it found in quoted text.

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