A centering approach to pronouns

Susan E. Brennan; Marilyn W. Friedman; Carl J. Pollard

A centering approach to pronouns

Susan E. Brennan
, Marilyn W. Friedman
, Carl J. Pollard

Psychology

Stony Brook University

Hewlett-Packard

Research output: Contribution to journal › Conference article › peer-review

310 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper we present a formalization of the centering approach to modeling attentional structure in discourse and use it as the basis for an algorithm to track discourse context and bind pronouns. As described in [GJW86], the process of centering attention on entities in the discourse gives rise to the intersentential transitional states of continuing, re~aining and shifting. We propose an extension to these states which handles some additional cases of multiple ambiguous pronouns. The algorithm has been implemented in an HPSG natural language system which serves as the interface to a database query application.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	155-162
Number of pages	8
Journal	Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume	1987-July
State	Published - 1987
Event	25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 1987 - Stanford, United States Duration: Jul 6 1987 → Jul 9 1987

Cite this

@article{47cba5c5674744e19000fe3d83b083c2,

title = "A centering approach to pronouns",

abstract = "In this paper we present a formalization of the centering approach to modeling attentional structure in discourse and use it as the basis for an algorithm to track discourse context and bind pronouns. As described in [GJW86], the process of centering attention on entities in the discourse gives rise to the intersentential transitional states of continuing, re\textasciitilde{}aining and shifting. We propose an extension to these states which handles some additional cases of multiple ambiguous pronouns. The algorithm has been implemented in an HPSG natural language system which serves as the interface to a database query application.",

author = "Brennan, \{Susan E.\} and Friedman, \{Marilyn W.\} and Pollard, \{Carl J.\}",

note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 1987 Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. All rights reserved.; 25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 1987 ; Conference date: 06-07-1987 Through 09-07-1987",

year = "1987",

language = "English",

volume = "1987-July",

pages = "155--162",

journal = "Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",

issn = "0736-587X",

publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)",

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TY - JOUR

T1 - A centering approach to pronouns

AU - Brennan, Susan E.

AU - Friedman, Marilyn W.

AU - Pollard, Carl J.

PY - 1987

Y1 - 1987

N2 - In this paper we present a formalization of the centering approach to modeling attentional structure in discourse and use it as the basis for an algorithm to track discourse context and bind pronouns. As described in [GJW86], the process of centering attention on entities in the discourse gives rise to the intersentential transitional states of continuing, re~aining and shifting. We propose an extension to these states which handles some additional cases of multiple ambiguous pronouns. The algorithm has been implemented in an HPSG natural language system which serves as the interface to a database query application.

AB - In this paper we present a formalization of the centering approach to modeling attentional structure in discourse and use it as the basis for an algorithm to track discourse context and bind pronouns. As described in [GJW86], the process of centering attention on entities in the discourse gives rise to the intersentential transitional states of continuing, re~aining and shifting. We propose an extension to these states which handles some additional cases of multiple ambiguous pronouns. The algorithm has been implemented in an HPSG natural language system which serves as the interface to a database query application.

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85144746911

M3 - Conference article

SN - 0736-587X

VL - 1987-July

SP - 155

EP - 162

JO - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

JF - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

T2 - 25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 1987

Y2 - 6 July 1987 through 9 July 1987

ER -

A centering approach to pronouns

Abstract

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