9 Linguistic Claims Formulated in Terms of Centering A Re‐Examination Using Parametric CB‐Tracking Techniques
Massimo Poesio · 2008
Abstract Reliable techniques were developed to annotate corpora with the information to test several instantiations of Centering, and software that could be used to automatically compute CFs and CB of utterances according to a variety of proposals.These methods were then used to evaluate several claims concerning discourse topics. Support was found for a variant of proposals by Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski concerning when demonstratives will be used to realize a discourse entity. Secondly, it was found that the transitions in which CB=CP are most predictive of subject pronominalization. The third studyrevealed a clear, but not very predictive, correlation between segment boundaries and the use of `discontinuous' transitions in which one or both of the utterances have no CB. Finally, support was found for the claim by Hitzeman and Poesio that only entities that have been CBs serve as the antecedent of long-distance pronouns.