"The Bidirectional Influence between Coherence Establishment and Pronoun Interpretation"
Hannah Rohde, Andrew Kehler · Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh) · 2008
Problem: Previous work finds that pronoun interpretation in transfer-of-possession contexts is sensitive to coherence-driven biases, but that work does not address a mystery that has also been reported for such contexts: an asymmetry between pronoun production and interpretation.Proposal: To explain the asymmetry, we introduce a Bayesian model of pronoun interpretation that distinguishes the primary factors (e.g., coherence relations) that generate expectations about who will be mentioned next (p(referent)) from those factors (e.g., subjecthood) that primarily determine whether a speaker will choose to use a pronoun instead of a name (p(pronoun | referent)).We predict more subject-biased coherence relations than non-subject-biased relations in a pronounprompt story-continuation condition.Results: We find that the rate at which a pronoun is interpreted to refer to the subject reflects the likelihood that the subject referent will be mentioned again (regardless of referring expression) and the likelihood that a speaker will use a pronoun.Crucially, we find that, in contexts with an ambiguous pronoun prompt, the mere presence of a pronoun, even if its referent is ambiguous, can change the distribution of coherence relations.