Tagung der
Computerlinguistik-
Studierenden

unterstützt von Finnova AG Gesellschaft für Sprachtechnologie & Computerlinguistik XLOG Technologies GmbH fat solutionlab Linguistische Datenverarbeitung / Computerlinguistik an der Universität Trier

Sebastian Lohmeier
Indirect Anaphors in a Programming Language: Anchoring, Coreference and Referential Ambiguity

Vortragsfolien

Abstract

Even though programming languages are called "languages", (computational) linguists and computer scientists do seldom look at programming languages from a linguistic perspective. The concept of Naturalistic Programming [1,2] invites such joint effort, and this talk seeks to contribute to it.

The talk introduces work on transferring a cognitive model of the resolution of indirect anaphors [3] to a compiler of an extension [4] of the Java programming language. An indirect anaphor refers to a referent that is not mentioned in the text but is instead related to an explicitly mentioned referent via world knowledge. Indirect anaphors are suited for integration into object-oriented programming languages, because the latter are used to model partial world knowledge.

It is explained how indirect anaphors are anchored in source code and how coreference is handled. Occurrences of referential ambiguity in the current implementation are shown and proposals are made for reducing ambiguity in future versions of the implementation.

• [1] C. V. Lopes, P. Dourish, D. H. Lorenz, and K. Lieberherr. Beyond AOP: toward naturalistic programming. SIGPLAN Not., 38(12):34–43, 2003.
• [2] R. Knöll and M. Mezini. Pegasus: first steps toward a naturalistic programming language. In OOPSLA ’06: Companion to the 21st ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, pages 542–559, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM.
• [3] M. Schwarz. Indirekte Anaphern in Texten. Niemeyer, Tübingen, 2000.
• [4] S. Lohmeier. Continuing to Shape Statically-Resolved Indirect Anaphora for Naturalistic Programming: A transfer from cognitive linguistics to the Java programming language. 2011.