@inproceedings{b68ef014b87a4961b34c02f6f7a85933,
title = "Discovering Pronoun Categories using Discourse Information",
abstract = "Interpretation of a pronoun is driven by properties of syntactic distribution. Consequently, acquiring the meaning and the distribution are intertwined. In order to learn that a pronoun is reflexive, learners need to know which entity the pronoun refers to in a sentence, but in order to infer its referent they need to know that the pronoun is reflexive. This study examines whether discourse information is the information source that the learner might use to acquire grammatical categories of pronouns. Experimental results demonstrate that adults can use discourse information to accurately guess the referents of pronouns. Simulations show that a Bayesian model using guesses from the experiment as an estimate of the discourse information successfully categorizes English pronouns into categories corresponding to reflexives and non-reflexives. Together, these results suggest that knowing which entities are likely to be referred to in the discourse can help learners acquire grammatical categories of pronouns.",
keywords = "Bayesian modeling, language acquisition",
author = "Naho Orita and Rebecca McKeown and Feldman, {Naomi H.} and Jeffrey Lidz and Jordan Boyd-Graber",
note = "Funding Information: Acknowledgments. We thank Viet-An Nguyen, Ke Zhai, Motoki Shiga, and members of the UMD Computational Psycholinguistics group for helpful comments and discussion. This research was supported by NSF IGERT 0801465 and NSF grant 1018625 (JBG). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} CogSci 2013.All rights reserved.; 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society - Cooperative Minds: Social Interaction and Group Dynamics, CogSci 2013 ; Conference date: 31-07-2013 Through 03-08-2013",
year = "2013",
language = "English",
series = "Cooperative Minds: Social Interaction and Group Dynamics - Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2013",
publisher = "The Cognitive Science Society",
pages = "3193--3198",
editor = "Markus Knauff and Natalie Sebanz and Michael Pauen and Ipke Wachsmuth",
booktitle = "Cooperative Minds",
}