Comprehension of Coreferentiai Expressions

Comprehension of Coreferential Expressions Peter C. Gordon Department of Psychology University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270 pcg@email.unc.edu Abstract The ways in which the form of referring expressions interacts with the structure of language are reviewed. Evidence from a number of different methods - quantitatively analyzed judgements of acceptable coreference, reading time, and corpus frequency of different types of coreferenfial expressions - converges on a fairly simple description of patterns of coreference.- A model is presented which integrates important aspects of Discourse Representation Theory and of Centering Theory in order to provide an account of how referential expressions are interpreted as part of constructing a discourse universe from a series of utterances. Introduction The study of coreference in generative linguistics has led to a very strong emphasis on how the hierarchical structure of sentences interacts with the form of referring expressions to constrain coreference (Chomsky, 1986; Reinhart, 1976). The resulting principles, embodied in the Binding Theory, provide rules that are of some use to researchers in natural- language processing because they provide information about disjoint reference - what an expression cannot refer to in certain circumstances. However, beyond that use theoretical work on the Binding Theory does not directly bear on questions central to language processing. Questions of how to resolve potentially ambiguous expression such as pronouns, or how meaning more generally is built up incrementally from linguistic expressions in context, are beyond its scope. Randall Hendrick Department of Linguistics University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3155 hendrick@email.unc.edu We (Gordon & Hendrick, 1997; 1999) have used the basic methods of experimental psychology to take a close look at the phenomena of coreference and disjoint reference involving full expressions (names and descriptions) that have been cited in support of Principle C of the Binding Theory. I The results show that the interaction of form of referring expression and language structure is far simpler than it has been taken to be in the Binding Theory. Further, results on the judged acceptability of different configurations of referential expressions are consistent with the results of experiments that use reading time as ~ano online measure of language comprehension (Gordon, Grosz & Gilliom, 1993; Gordon, Hendricl~ Ledoux & Yang, 1999). Further, those results are consistent with the frequency of different types of coreferentiai configurations in corpora of naturally-occurring language (Ariel, 1994; Carden, 1982; van Hock, 1997). The pattern of" coreference that is observed with these three types of measures (intuitive judgments, reading time, and frequency in a corpus) is accounted for by a model (Gordon & Hendricl~ 1998) that incorporates aspects of Centering Theory (Grosz, Joshi, & Weinstein, 1995) into Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp & Reyle, 1993). • '. Principle C of the Binding Theory states that an r- expression cannot have a c-commanding antecedent. A constituent ct is said to "c-command another constituent 13if the first branching node that dominates a dominates 13 as well. 82 0 @ 0 0 @ 0 @ @ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 …

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