Can Anaphoric Definite Descriptions be Replaced by Pronouns?
Judita Preiss, Caroline Gasperin, Ted Briscoe · 2004
We investigate the hypothesis that a pronoun is used in discourse, when its antecedent is in the focus of the discourse.We create a corpus of 'replaced anaphoric definite descriptions', where occurrences of definite descriptions are replaced with a corresponding pronoun.We use the Lappin and Leass (1994) anaphora resolution algorithm on the new corpus, and obtain a much lower performance than when the corpus only contains genuine pronouns, thus supporting the hypothesis.