The DAD Parallel Corpora and their Uses

Abstract

This paper deals with the uses of the annotations of third person singular neuter pronouns in the DAD parallel and comparable corpora of Danish and Italian texts and spoken data. The annotations contain information about the functions of these pronouns and their uses as abstract anaphora. Abstract anaphora have constructions such as verbal phrases, clauses and discourse segments as antecedents and refer to abstract objects comprising events, situations and propositions. The analysis of the annotated data shows the language specific characteristics of abstract anaphora in the two languages compared with the uses of abstract anaphora in English. Finally, the paper presents machine learning experiments run on the annotated data in order to identify the functions of third person singular neuter personal pronouns and neuter demonstrative pronouns. The results of these experiments vary from corpus to corpus. However, they are all comparable with the results obtained in similar tasks in other languages. This is very promising because the experiments have been run on both written and spoken data using a classification of the pronominal functions which is much more fine-grained than the classifications used in other studies.

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