tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "SEARCH AND INFERENCE STRATEGIES IN PRONOUN RESOLUTION"

The qusstlun of how people resolve pronouns has the various factors combine. been of interest to language theorists for a long time because so much of what goes on when people find referents for pronouns seems to lie at the heart of comprehension. | SEARCH AND INFERENCE STRATEGIES IN PRONOUN RESOLUTION AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY Kate Ehrlich Department of Psychology University of Massachusetts MA Ambers t The question of how people resolve pronouns has been of interest to language theorists for a long time because so much of what goes on when people find referents for pronouns seems to lie at the heart of comprehension. However despite the relevance of pronouns for comprehension and language theory the processes that contribute to pronoun resolution have proved notoriously difficult to pin down. Part of the difficulty arises from the wide range of factors that can affect which antecedent noun phrase In a text is understood to be co-referential with a particular pronoun. These factors can range from simple number gender agreement through selectlonal restrictions to quite complex knowledge that has been acquired from the text see Webber 1978 for a neatly Illustrated description of many of these factors . Research in psychology artificial intelligence and linguistics has gone a long way toward identifying some of these factors and their role in pronoun resolution. For instance in psychology research carried out by Caramazza and his colleagues Caramazza et al 1977 as well as research that I have done Ehrlich 1980 has demonstrated that number gender agreement really can function to constrain the choice of referent in a way that significantly facilitates processing within an Al framework there has been some very interesting work carried out by Sldner 1977 and Grosz 1977 that seeks to identify the current topic of a text and to show that knowledge of the topic can considerably simplify pronoun resolution. It is important that people are able to select appropriate referents for pronouns and to have some basis for that decision. The research discussed so far has mentioned some of the factors that contribute to those decisions. However part of the problem of really understanding how people resolve pronouns is knowing how .