A Predictive Model for Notional Anaphora in English

TL;DR

This paper presents a large-scale empirical model for predicting notional anaphora in English, revealing that local and genre factors significantly influence pronoun agreement choices, challenging existing theoretical assumptions.

Contribution

It introduces the largest empirical dataset and an ensemble prediction model for notional anaphora, providing new insights into factors affecting pronoun agreement.

Findings

State-of-the-art prediction accuracy achieved

Circumstances at the anaphor's location influence agreement

Genre and global factors significantly affect pronoun choice

Abstract

Notional anaphors are pronouns which disagree with their antecedents' grammatical categories for notional reasons, such as plural to singular agreement in: 'the government ... they'. Since such cases are rare and conflict with evidence from strictly agreeing cases ('the government ... it'), they present a substantial challenge to both coreference resolution and referring expression generation. Using the OntoNotes corpus, this paper takes an ensemble approach to predicting English notional anaphora in context on the basis of the largest empirical data to date. In addition to state of the art prediction accuracy, the results suggest that theoretical approaches positing a plural construal at the antecedent's utterance are insufficient, and that circumstances at the anaphor's utterance location, as well as global factors such as genre, have a strong effect on the choice of referring expression.