Effects of Centering Parameters "Utterance" and "R1—Pronoun" on Chinese and English Anaphora Resolution:A Contrastive Study
Sun Shan-shan · Waiguoyu · 2013
This paper adopts a parametric approach to the Centering Theory and carries out an analysis of the annotated corpora of Chinese and English folklore and children's stories to examine the effects of the setting of two Centering parameters,namely and R1-pronoun,on the resolution of Chinese and English anaphora. Results show that there are following similarities in the two languages:1) identifying utterances with clauses yields a significantly higher precision rate in zero anaphora resolution than identifying them with sentences;2) zero anaphora resolution achieves a much better result than pronoun resolution;3) the setting of the R1-pronoun parameter has a much stronger impact on the resolution than the utterance parameter,and 4) the resolution of anaphors on the subject position shows a better result than those on other grammatical positions. However,differences are also found between the two languages;1 ) Chinese anaphora resolution yields much higher precision rates than the English one in both of the two definitions of utterance,and 2 ) the setting of produces a stronger effect on pronoun resolution in English than in Chinese.