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
Bibkey:
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)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-2406.pdf
Note:
 W18-2406.Notes.pdf
Data
OntoNotes 5.0