A corpus based investigation of morphological disagreement in anaphoric relations

This paper investigates the causes of the comparatively low success rates in finding the antecedents of plural pronouns as compared to finding antecedents of singular pronouns. We are trying to show experimentally that considering morphological agreement as a strong constraint in pronoun resolution results in the erroneous interpretation of almost a quarter of the plural pronouns. The work is based on analysing sample texts from the British National Corpus and online technical manuals.

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