Forms of Anaphoric Reference to Organisational Named Entities: Hoping to widen appeal, they diversified
Christian Hardmeier, Luca Bevacqua, Sharid Loáiciga, Hannah Rohde
Abstract
Proper names of organisations are a special case of collective nouns. Their meaning can be conceptualised as a collective unit or as a plurality of persons, allowing for different morphological marking of coreferent anaphoric pronouns. This paper explores the variability of references to organisation names with 1) a corpus analysis and 2) two crowd-sourced story continuation experiments. The first shows that the preference for singular vs. plural conceptualisation is dependent on the level of formality of a text. In the second, we observe a strong preference for the plural they otherwise typical of informal speech. Using edited corpus data instead of constructed sentences as stimuli reduces this preference.- Anthology ID:
- W18-2406
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Seventh Named Entities Workshop
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- Melbourne, Australia
- Editors:
- Nancy Chen, Rafael E. Banchs, Xiangyu Duan, Min Zhang, Haizhou Li
- Venue:
- NEWS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 36–40
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W18-2406
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W18-2406
- Cite (ACL):
- Christian Hardmeier, Luca Bevacqua, Sharid Loáiciga, and Hannah Rohde. 2018. Forms of Anaphoric Reference to Organisational Named Entities: Hoping to widen appeal, they diversified. In Proceedings of the Seventh Named Entities Workshop, pages 36–40, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Forms of Anaphoric Reference to Organisational Named Entities: Hoping to widen appeal, they diversified (Hardmeier et al., NEWS 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/W18-2406.pdf
- Data
- OntoNotes 5.0