Event versus entity co-reference: Effects of context and form of referring expression

Abstract

Anaphora resolution systems require both an enumeration of possible candidate antecedents and an identification process of the antecedent. This paper focuses on (i) the impact of the form of referring expression on entity-vsevent preferences and (ii) how properties of the passage interact with referential form. Two crowd-sourced story-continuation experiments were conducted, using constructed and naturally-occurring passages, to see how participants interpret It and This pronouns following a context sentence that makes available event and entity referents. Our participants show a strong, but not categorical, bias to use This to refer to events and It to refer to entities. However, these preferences vary with passage characteristics such as verb class (a proxy in our constructed examples for the number of explicit and implicit entities) and more subtle author intentions regarding subsequent re-mention (the original event-vs-entity re-mention of our corpus items).

Event and Entity Coreference Across Five Languages: Effects of Context and Referring Expression

“…This is confirmed in the study by Çokal et al (2018), where it was found to corefer to concrete entities both in production and interpretation, while this was biased towards non-NP, less salient antecedents. Likewise, in our previous study (Loáiciga et al, 2018) we find a preference for it to refer to entities and of this to refer to events. Similar results were also found by Wittenberg et al (2021) looking at it versus that, with the demonstrative being preferred for event coreference: this is interpreted as a "conceptual bundling" action of that, which would make event antecedents accessible by wrapping their complex structure in a simpler referring expression.…”

“…The analysis for English should replicate the results of Loáiciga et al (2018), wherein we found a bias for It to corefer with entities and This with events, along with an effect of verb type, with verbs permitting alternation yielding more event coreference. The current analysis adds verbal aspect as a further predictor.…”

“…Our chosen target pronouns can be seen in Table 1. While the English pronouns are the same as those used in our previous study (Loáiciga et al, 2018), where we targeted the personal pronoun it and the demonstrative this, other factors guided the choice in the other four languages.…”

“…This made the wine more marketable. This ambiguity has been the subject of work on the coreference system in English, with evidence of a split between comprehenders' preferential interpretation of personal versus demonstrative pronouns (Çokal et al, 2018;Loáiciga et al, 2018). Specifically, personal pronouns are preferred when referring to concrete entities, and demonstratives when referring to other more complex or abstract antecedents (see §2.1).…”

“…Jespersen (1927) classes verbs that can undergo this alternation as "move and change verbs", as they often describe changes in state or movement: the transitive use, then, makes available the implicit entity that brought on the change. Alternating verbs, by offering this additional implicit entity to the pool of coreference possibilities even when the verb appears in the intransitive, have been shown to increase event coreference in English (Loáiciga et al, 2018); for non-alternating verbs, the sole entity available in the sentence seemingly becomes relatively more salient by not having competition from other implicit entities. However, this is a gradable phenomenon, in that some verbs position in between categories: even verbs which are most firmly in the non-alternating category can have rare or idiomatic transitive uses (e.g.…”