About

The project

ARRAU was a project on anaphora interpretation funded by the EPSRC, grant number GR/S76434/01, that ran from 2004 to 2007.

Objectives

The objective of the ARRAU project was to study the cases of anaphoric reference most problematic for current anaphora resolution systems, in particular:

• Reference to plurals

• Reference to abstract objects such as events and plans

• Ambiguous anaphoric expressions

Theoretical goals

• Revise current models of the interpretation of plurals and events

• Develop a model of reference to plans

• Evaluate hypotheses about underspecification in reference to structured objects

• Yield a better understanding of the phenomenon of (semantic) underspecification

Methods

• Corpus analysis and annotation (University of Essex)

  • Identify questions to be studied through psychological studies

  • Produce an annotated corpus

• Psychological experiments (University of Glasgow)

  • Provide empirical evidence to be used to modify our existing anaphora resolution system, which will be evaluated using the annotated corpus