Modeling Brain Activity Associated with Pronoun Resolution in English and Chinese

Jixing Li, Murielle Fabre, Wen-Ming Luh, John Hale


Abstract
Typological differences between English and Chinese suggest stronger reliance on salience of the antecedent during pronoun resolution in Chinese. We examined this hypothesis by correlating a difficulty measure of pronoun resolution derived by the activation-based ACT-R model with the brain activity of English and Chinese participants listening to a same audiobook during fMRI recording. The ACT-R model predicts higher overall difficulty for English speakers, which is supported at the brain level in left Broca’s area. More generally, it confirms that computational modeling approach is able to dissociate different dimensions that are involved in the complex process of pronoun resolution in the brain.
Anthology ID:
W18-0710
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Venue:
CRAC
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
87–96
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0710
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-0710
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jixing Li, Murielle Fabre, Wen-Ming Luh, and John Hale. 2018. Modeling Brain Activity Associated with Pronoun Resolution in English and Chinese. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference, pages 87–96, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Brain Activity Associated with Pronoun Resolution in English and Chinese (Li et al., CRAC 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/W18-0710.pdf