Discourse anaphora in Peninsular Spanish interactions: Signalling alignment through anaphor selection

This study investigated two hypotheses concerning the use of anaphors in information retrieval. The first hypothesis, that anaphors tend to refer to integral concepts rather than to peripheral concepts, was well supported. Two samples of documents, one in psychology and the other in computer science, were examined by subject experts who judged the centrality of phrases which were referred to anaphorically. The second hypothesis, that various term weighting schemes are affected differently by anaphoric resolution, was also well supported. It was found that schemes which incorporate document length into the calculations produce much smaller increases in term weights for terms occurring in anaphoric resolutions than do those which do not consider document length. It is concluded that although anaphoric resolution has potential for better representing the “aboutness” of a document, care must be taken in choosing both the anaphoric classes to be resolved and the term weighting schemes to be used in measuring a document's topicality.

Discourse structure and anaphora: Written and conversational english

This paper aims to shed light on the question of how interactants use the concurrent organizations of assessments and three different gaze patterns as resources for stance taking in everyday conversation. The data come from two recordings of everyday conversation. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims to show that stance taking is an intersubjective and collaborative social activity in which interactants, by relying on various linguistic and interactional resources, construct stances based on stances by prior speakers. Second, it suggests that the investigated three gaze patterns play an important role in the stance-taking activity. The data show that although the interrelationship between gaze and assessments is manifold, certain gaze patterns are interdependent with the making of assessments and therefore gaze and assessments can be seen to function together as resources for interactional stance taking. Additionally, these gaze patterns act as resources for the coparticipants in tracing the meanings of coparticipants' stances. However, it is not claimed that these gaze patterns have meanings in themselves or that they would implicate a speaker stance, but rather that together with language, gaze is an important element in interactants' intersubjective stance taking.

The degree of semantic similarity between an anaphoric noun phrase (e.g., the bird) and its antecedent (e.g., a robin) is known to affect the anaphor resolution process, but the mechanisms that underlie this effect are not known. One proposal (Almor, 1999) is that semantic similarity triggers interference effects in working memory and makes two crucial assumptions: First, semantic similarity impairs working memory just as phonological similarity does (e.g., Baddeley, 1992), and, second, this impairment interferes with processes of sentence comprehension. We tested these assumptions in two experiments that compared recall accuracy between phonologically similar, semantically similar, and control words in sentence contexts. Our results do not provide support for Almor's claims: Phonological overlap decreased recall accuracy in sentence contexts, but semantic similarity did not. These results shed doubt on the idea that semantic interference in working memory is an underlying mechanism in anaphor resolution.