Pragmatic constraints and pronoun reference disambiguation: the possible and the impossible

Abstract: Pronoun disambiguation in understanding text and discourse often requires the application of both general pragmatic knowledge and context-specific information. In AI and linguistics research, this has mostly been studied in cases where the referent is explicitly stated in the preceding text nearby. However, pronouns in natural text often refer to entities, collections, or events that are only implicitly mentioned previously; in those cases the need to use pragmatic knowledge to disambiguate becomes much more acute and the characterization of the knowledge becomes much more difficult. Extended literary texts at times employ both extremely complex patterns of reference and extremely rich and subtle forms of knowledge. Indeed, it is occasionally possible to have a pronoun that is far separated from its referent in a text. In the opposite direction, pronoun use is affected by considerations of focus of attention and by formal constraints such as a preference for parallel syntactic structures; these can be so strong that no pragmatic knowledge suffices to overrule them.