The 43rd Language Lunch
Date: 2014-06-18
Location: G.07 Informatics Forum
ParCor 1.0: A parallel pronoun-coreference corpus to support statistical MT
Liane,Guillou; informatics; None
We present ParCor, a parallel corpus of texts in which pronoun coreference (reduced coreference in which pronouns are used as referring expressions) has been annotated. The corpus is intended to be used both as a resource from which to learn systematic differences in pronoun use between languages and ultimately for developing and testing informed SMT systems to address the problem of pronoun coreference in translation. At present, the corpus consists of a collection of parallel English-German documents from two different text genres – TED talks and EU Bookshop publications. All documents in the corpus have been manually annotated with respect to the type and location of each pronoun and, where relevant, its antecedent. Construction of the corpus is ongoing, with plans for additional genres and languages in the future.rn
Do demonstratives always directly refer?
Henry,Schiller; PPLS; None
Deferred uses of demonstratives have generally been thought of as non-standard or figurative cases of language use. Allyson Mount (2008) has argued instead that all demonstrative reference is determined by some object being the cognitive focus of all conversational participants. In this paper I argue that while this uniform theory of reference is able to account for cases of deferred demonstration where the demonstrative is used to directly refer to an object, it fails for cases of demonstrative use which resemble attributive descriptions. I propose that one way to accommodate these attributive uses of demonstratives into Mount’s uniform theory of reference is to consider them to be anaphoric on descriptive phrases which have been made contextually salient, and which link the demonstrated object to a class of possible referents.rn
Variables, direct reference, and unstructured propositions
Tom,Schoonen; PPLS; None
Soames (1987, 2008) has provided one of the most influential arguments against unstructured propositions—i.e. propositions as sets of truth-supporting circumstances. He claims that the assumption of unstructured propositions in combination with the direct reference thesis (and some further innocent assumptions) leads to absurd conclusions.rn The aim of this paper is to show that Soames makes a mistake in his reductio by conflating assertoric content and semantic value. I suggest that this distinction leads to two distinct theses/assumptions with regards to direct reference and that neither of these theses can support Soames’ argument. Finally, I will suggest that it might be worthwhile to try to formulate his argument with the assumption of rigidity instead of direct reference.rn
Pre-speech tongue movements recorded with ultrasound
Pertti,Palo; None; None
The tongue moves silently in preparation for speech. We analyse Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (UTI) data of these pre-speech to speech phases from five speakers, whose native languages (L1) are English (n = 3), German, and Finnish. Single words in the subjects’ respective L1 were elicited by a standard picture naming task. Our focus is to automate the detection of speech preparation through the analysis of raw UTI probe-return data, here captured at 201 fps. We analyse these movements with a pixel difference method, which yields an estimate of the rate of change on a frame by frame basis. We describe typical time dependent pixel difference contours and report grand average contours for each of the speakers.
