@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2022-quantifying,
    title = "Quantifying Discourse Support for Omitted Pronouns",
    author = "Zhang, Shulin  and
      Li, Jixing  and
      Hale, John",
    editor = "Ogrodniczuk, Maciej  and
      Pradhan, Sameer  and
      Nedoluzhko, Anna  and
      Ng, Vincent  and
      Poesio, Massimo",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference",
    month = oct,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Gyeongju, Republic of Korea",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.crac-1.1",
    pages = "1--12",
    abstract = "Pro-drop is commonly seen in many languages, but its discourse motivations have not been well characterized. Inspired by the topic chain theory in Chinese, this study shows how character-verb usage continuity distinguishes dropped pronouns from overt references to story characters. We model the choice to drop vs. not drop as a function of character-verb continuity. The results show that omitted subjects have higher character history-current verb continuity salience than non-omitted subjects. This is consistent with the idea that discourse coherence with a particular topic, such as a story character, indeed facilitates the omission of pronouns in languages and contexts where they are optional.",
}