Search Results (11)

Pronoun resolution is essential for language comprehension, yet the neural mechanisms underlying this process remain poorly characterized. Here, we investigate the neural dynamics of impersonal pronoun processing using electroencephalography combined with machine learning approaches. We developed a novel experimental paradigm that contrasts impersonal pronoun resolution with direct nominal reference processing. Using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings and machine learning techniques, including local learning-based clustering feature selection (LLCFS), recursive feature elimination (RFE), and logistic regression (LR), we analyzed neural responses from twenty participants. Our approach revealed differential EEG feature patterns across frontal, temporal, and parietal electrodes within multiple frequency bands during pronoun resolution compared to nominal reference tasks, achieving classification accuracies of 78.52% for subject-dependent and 60.10% for cross-subject validation. Behavioral data revealed longer reaction times and lower accuracy for pronoun resolution compared to nominal reference tasks. Combined with differential EEG patterns, these findings demonstrate that pronoun resolution engages more complex mechanisms of referent selection and verification compared to nominal reference tasks. The results establish potential EEG-based indicators for language processing assessment, offering new directions for cross-linguistic investigations. Full article

In the current information age, with the exponential growth of data volume and language-based applications, the accurate resolution of intra-contextual relationships in texts has become indispensable for both academic research and industrial Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. This study focuses on the detection of pronominal anaphora in Turkish sentences. For the detection of pronominal anaphora, a specific dataset comprising 2000 sentences and 72,239 tokens was created, and this dataset was labeled using a BIO tagging method developed with a custom approach for this study. In this work, fine-tuning was performed on Transformer-based language models pre-trained on Turkish data, such as BERT and RoBERTa. Additionally, Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on Turkish data, including Turkcell-LLM-7b-v1 and ytu-ce-cosmos/Turkish-Llama-8b-DPO-v0.1, as well as multilingual models like Microsoft’s Phi-3 Mini-4K-Instruct and OpenAI’s GPT-4o-mini, were also fine-tuned with the created dataset to detect pronominal anaphora in sentences. Following the training of the language models, the resulting performance was evaluated using pronoun accuracy, antecedent accuracy, exact match, and F1-score metrics. According to the results obtained in the pronominal anaphora detection phase of the study, a novel hybrid ensemble approach combining multiple Transformer models with linguistic rules achieved the highest performance. This hybrid system attained scores of 0.987 for pronoun accuracy, 0.977 for antecedent accuracy, 0.505 for exact match, and 0.960 for F1-score, surpassing all individual models, including GPT-4o-mini. These findings reveal the superiority of ensemble methods combined with Turkish-specific linguistic rules over standalone models in Turkish anaphora resolution. This study is considered novel, as it is the first work to apply hybrid ensemble methods with linguistic rule integration to this domain for the Turkish language. Full article

Understanding discourse context is fundamental to human language comprehension. Despite the remarkable progress achieved by Large Language Models, they still struggle with discourse-level anaphora resolution, particularly in Chinese. One major challenge is zero anaphora, a prevalent linguistic phenomenon in which referential elements are omitted, increasing complexity and ambiguity for computational models. To address this issue, we introduce CDAMR (Chinese Discourse Abstract Meaning Representation), a novel annotated corpus that systematically labels zero pronouns across diverse syntactic positions along with their discourse-level coreference chains. In addition, we present a hierarchical discourse-semantic enhanced model that separately encodes local discourse semantics and global discourse semantics, and models their interactions via structured multi-attention mechanisms. Experiments on both CDAMR and OntoNotes demonstrate the approach’s cross-corpus generalizability and effectiveness, achieving F1 scores of 59.86% and 60.54%, respectively. Ablation studies further confirm that discourse-level semantics significantly enhance zero pronoun resolution. These findings highlight the value of cognitively inspired discourse modeling and the importance of comprehensive discourse annotations for languages with limited explicit syntactic cues such as Chinese. Full article

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet they continue to struggle with deep semantic understanding, particularly in tasks like coreference resolution and structured semantic inference. This study presents a hybrid neuro-symbolic pipeline that combines transformer-based contextual encoding with symbolic coreference resolution and Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing to improve natural language understanding. The pipeline resolves referential ambiguity using a rule-based coreference module and generates semantic graphs from disambiguated input using a symbolic AMR parser. Experiments on public benchmark datasets—PreCo for coreference and the AMR 3.0 Public Subset for semantic parsing—demonstrate that our hybrid model consistently outperforms symbolic-only and neural-only baselines. The model achieved notable gains in F1 scores for coreference (72.4%) and Smatch scores for semantic parsing (76.5%), with marked improvements in pronoun resolution and semantic role labeling. In addition to accuracy, the pipeline offers interpretability through modular components and auditable intermediate outputs, making it suitable for high-stakes applications requiring transparency. These findings show that integrating symbolic reasoning within neural architecture offers a robust and practical path toward overcoming key limitations of current LLMs in semantic-level NLP tasks. Full article

Event coreference resolution is a crucial component in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications as it directly affects text summarization, machine translation, classification, and textual entailment. However, the research on this task for Arabic language is limited, compared to other languages such as English, Chinese and Spanish. This paper aims to review the state-of-the-art approaches in event coreference (EC) within the context of coreference resolution tasks, emphasizing the significance of EC in NLP. The focus is placed on the latest developments in Arabic language processing related to event coreference. To fill this gap, a comprehensive study of existing work is conducted, and new approaches are suggested. The paper highlights the challenges specific to Arabic event coreference resolution, such as the variability of verb forms, pronoun ambiguity, ellipsis and null arguments, lexical and morphological variation, lack of annotated resources, discourse and pragmatic context, and cultural and contextual sensitivity. Addressing these challenges requires a deep understanding of Arabic linguistics, advanced NLP techniques, and the availability of annotated resources. Furthermore, this paper examines the existing datasets and methods for Arabic event coreference and proposes an annotation scheme. By leveraging existing NLP algorithms and developing event coreference resolution systems tailored for Arabic, the accuracy and performance of NLP tasks can be significantly improved. Full article

This paper introduces a multi-layered cross-genre corpus, annotated for coreference resolution, causal relations, and temporal relations, comprising a variety of genres, from news articles and children’s stories to Reddit posts. Our results reveal distinctive genre-specific characteristics at each layer of annotation, highlighting unique challenges for both annotators and machine learning models. Children’s stories feature linear temporal structures and clear causal relations. In contrast, news articles employ non-linear temporal sequences with minimal use of explicit causal or conditional language and few first-person pronouns. Lastly, Reddit posts are author-centered explanations of ongoing situations, with occasional meta-textual reference. Our annotation schemes are adapted from existing work to better suit a broader range of text types. We argue that our multi-layered cross-genre corpus not only reveals genre-specific semantic characteristics but also indicates a rich contextual interplay between the various layers of semantic information. Our MLCG corpus is shared under the open-source Apache 2.0 license. Full article

With the abundance of conversations happening everywhere, dialogue summarization plays an increasingly important role in the real world. However, dialogues inevitably involve many personal pronouns, which hinder the performance of existing dialogue summarization models. This work proposes a framework named WHORU to inject external personal pronoun resolution (PPR) information into abstractive dialogue summarization models. A simple and effective PPR method for the dialogue domain is further proposed to reduce time and space consumption. Experiments demonstrated the superiority of the proposed methods. More importantly, WHORU achieves new SOTA results on SAMSum and AMI datasets. Full article

In the age of big data, there is increasing growth of data on the Internet. It becomes frustrating for users to locate the desired data. Therefore, text summarization emerges as a solution to this problem. It summarizes and presents the users with the gist of the provided documents. However, summarizer systems face challenges, such as poor grammaticality, missing important information, and redundancy, particularly in multi-document summarization. This study involves the development of a graph-based extractive generic MDS technique, named Grapharizer (GRAPH-based summARIZER), focusing on resolving these challenges. Grapharizer addresses the grammaticality problems of the summary using lemmatization during pre-processing. Furthermore, synonym mapping, multi-word expression mapping, and anaphora and cataphora resolution, contribute positively to improving the grammaticality of the generated summary. Challenges, such as redundancy and proper coverage of all topics, are dealt with to achieve informativity and representativeness. Grapharizer is a novel approach which can also be used in combination with different machine learning models. The system was tested on DUC 2004 and Recent News Article datasets against various state-of-the-art techniques. Use of Grapharizer with machine learning increased accuracy by up to 23.05% compared with different baseline techniques on ROUGE scores. Expert evaluation of the proposed system indicated the accuracy to be more than 55%. Full article

The acquisition of clitics still remains a highly controversial issue in Greek acquisition literature despite the bulk of studies performed. Object clitics have been shown to be early acquired by monolingual children in terms of production rates, whereas only highly proficient bilingual children achieve target-like performance. Crucially, errors in gender marking are persistent for monolingual and bilingual children even when adult-like production rates are achieved. This study aims to readdress the acquisition of clitics in an innovative way, by entering the variable of gender in an experimental design targeting to assess production and processing by bilingual and monolingual children. Moreover, we examined the role of language proficiency (in terms of general verbal intelligence and syntactic production abilities). The groups had comparable performance in both tasks (in terms of correct responses and error distribution in production and reaction times in comprehension). However, verbal intelligence had an effect on the performance of the monolingual but not of the bilingual group in the production task, and bilingual children were overall slower in the comprehension task. Syntactic production abilities did not have any effect. We argue that gender marking affects clitic processing, and we discuss the implications of our findings for bilingual acquisition. Full article

Pronoun resolution plays an important role in language comprehension. However, little is known about its recruited cognitive mechanisms. Our investigation aims to explore the cognitive mechanisms underlying various types of pronoun resolution in Chinese using an electroencephalograph (EEG). We used three convolutional neural networks (CNNs)—LeNeT-5, GoogleNet, and EffifcientNet—to discover high-level feature abstractions of the EEG spatial topologies. The output of the three models was then fused using different scales by principal component analysis (PCA) to achieve cognitive workload classification. Overall, the workload classification rate by fusing three deep networks can be achieved at 55–63% in a participant-specific manner. We provide evidence that both the behavioral indicator of reaction time and the neural indicator of cognitive workload collected during pronoun resolution vary depending on the type of the pronoun. We observed an increase in reaction time accompanied by a decrease of the theta power while participants were processing ambiguous pronoun resolution compared to unambiguous controls. We propose that ambiguous pronoun resolution involves a more time-consuming yet more flexible cognitive mechanism, consistent with the predictions of the decision-making framework from an influential pragmatic tradition. Our results extend previous research that the cognitive states of resolving ambiguous and unambiguous pronouns are differentiated, indicating that cognitive workload evaluated using the method of machine learning for analysis of EEG signals acts as a complementary indicator for studying pronoun resolution and serves as an important inspiration for human–machine interaction. Full article

Visual dialog demonstrates several important aspects of multimodal artificial intelligence; however, it is hindered by visual grounding and visual coreference resolution problems. To overcome these problems, we propose the novel neural module network for visual dialog (NMN-VD). NMN-VD is an efficient question-customized modular network model that combines only the modules required for deciding answers after analyzing input questions. In particular, the model includes a Refer module that effectively finds the visual area indicated by a pronoun using a reference pool to solve a visual coreference resolution problem, which is an important challenge in visual dialog. In addition, the proposed NMN-VD model includes a method for distinguishing and handling impersonal pronouns that do not require visual coreference resolution from general pronouns. Furthermore, a new Compare module that effectively handles comparison questions found in visual dialogs is included in the model, as well as a Find module that applies a triple-attention mechanism to solve visual grounding problems between the question and the image. The results of various experiments conducted using a set of large-scale benchmark data verify the efficacy and high performance of our proposed NMN-VD model. Full article