Title

Nominal Expressions in Multilingual Corpora: Definites and Demonstratives

Authors

Susanne Salmon-Alt (ATILF – CNRS 44 avenue de la Libération, B.P. 30687 54063 Nancy Cedex, France)

Renata Vieira (Centro de Ciências da Comunicação e Centro de Ciências Exatas e Tecnológica, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos São Leopoldo, Brazil)

Session

WP4: Corpus Annotation

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a multilingual corpus study on definite descriptions and demonstrative noun phrases. The analysis made on a parallel corpus (French and Portuguese) reinforces previous findings regarding the predominance of non-anaphoric uses of definite descriptions in English corpus. It is also shown that the use of demonstrative noun phrases, on the other hand, is more regularly based on discourse salient entities. The analysis involves syntactic issues and is oriented to the design of natural language processing tools.

Keywords

Descriptions, Demonstrative noun phrases

Full Paper

198.pdf