Anaphora Resolution

According to the Britannica Online Encyclopedia (Britannica) the term “anaphora” means “a carrying up or back” in Greek. In written or oral text it can be thought of as “pointing back or referring to something or someone mentioned earlier”. The entity to which it refers is called its antecedent. The process of determining the antecedent of an anaphor is called anaphora resolution.

It may be noted that anaphora resolution was not by reference to the text of episode in Grand Qur'aan but was based upon conjectural stories of Jews and Christians. Such presumptive statements are patently erroneous in view of the ground reality that the majority of the people of the Book already believe in Al-Maseiha, Easa the son of Maryam, the Messenger of Allah the Exalted.

Arabic is an agglutinative language, the pronouns can occur as suffixes of nouns, verbs or prepositions. Therefore, Anaphora Resolution is vital to understanding the meaning of Grand Qur'aan. It means the problem of resolving what a pronoun refers to. In written or oral text anaphora can be thought of as “pointing back or referring to something or someone mentioned earlier”. The entity to which it refers is called its antecedent. The process of determining the antecedent of an anaphor—lexical entity is called anaphora resolution. It is contrasted with cataphora that refers forwards, not backwards.

Pronouns form a special class of anaphors because of their empty semantic structure; they do not have an independent meaning from their antecedent. Thus they will refer a singular entity.

Typology of Arabic Anaphors

1. Pronominal Anaphora

Pronouns form a special class of anaphors because of their empty semantic structure; they do not have an independent meaning from their antecedent. In addition, not all pronouns are anaphoric: e.g., deictic pronouns such as Ana-I, Anta You and Nahno-We.

Pronominal anaphora includes third personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns and relative pronouns.

Personal pronouns: In Arabic third personal pronouns can be classified in disjoint or joint pronouns and also in nominative, dative or accusative ones. Thus we distinguish:

Nominative disjoint personal pronouns: Howa, Heya, huma, hum, hunna.

Pleonastic pronouns are considered non-anaphoric since they are not interpreted as linked to any expression (antecedent). For example, in English the pronoun "it" could be pleonastic, e.g., "It is important". Similarly in Arabic language, the joint pronoun "hu, ha" can be non-anaphoric in some cases. {example not from Q quoted]

Grand Qur'aan is characterized by very frequent use of anaphors. The majority of anaphoric devices in it appear around pronominal anaphors. Hence, the ability to resolve pronoun antecedent is vital to understanding the Qur'aan.

Resolving pronoun reference is vital to understanding the meaning of Qur'aan.

Grand Qur'aan relies on the reader's world knowledge and intuition when using pronouns without explicitly including any antecedent information. For example a good number of second person pronouns in the Qur'aan refer to exalted Messenger Muhammad sas with no prior mention of his name as firstly in 2:4
 

Indeed, Arabic is an agglutinative language, the pronouns can occur as suffixes of nouns, verbs or prepositions.

For resolving some cases of anaphors, semantic information is needed. In example (3) the words “medicine” and “ill” must be associated with each other in order to resolve the anaphor correctly. It cannot be done without world knowledge. (2) Tom andis Bobile rohtu, sest ta oli haige. Tom gave Bob medicine, because he was ill.

Anaphora can be divided into different types according to the categories (Mitkov 99, Hirst 81) below: • Pronominal – the most widespread form of anaphora: “he”, “she”, “they” etc. • Lexical noun phrase – widely used in newspaper articles, represented by definite 5 noun phrases, synonyms or proper names: “the 26 year old singer”, “the Iron Lady” etc. • Ordinal – “first”, “last”, “former”, “latter” etc. • One-anaphora – “I take the red book, you take the blue one.” • Adverb – “My sister went to Tallinn and stayed there for two days”. The anaphor “there” refers to “Tallinn”. • Verb phrase – “She chose the third door. The decision was wrong”. Here “the decision” refers to the act of choosing the third door in the first sentence. • Zero-anaphora – the pronoun is left out: “John was tired and went to bed” Also, sometimes anaphora is also classified by its location in sentences. There are two types (Mitkov 99):

• Intersentential anaphor - refers to the antecedent in a different sentence • Intrasentential anaphor - refers to the antecedent in the same sentence There is another type of anaphora that refers forwards, not backwards. This type of referral is called cataphora and is defined as follows: “Cataphora is the coreference of one expression with another expression which follows it. The following expression provides the information necessary for interpretation of the preceding one. This is often understood as an expression “referring” forward to another expression.” (SIL)

1.2 Common approaches to anaphora resolution Various approaches have been used for anaphora resolution throughout the decades. According to Mitkov (Mitkov 99) these approaches can be classified to the following two groups: 1) Traditional approach: integrates knowledge sources/indicators that discount unlikely candidates until a minimal set of plausible candidates is obtained and then makes use of center or focus, or other preference. 2) Alternative approach: computes the most likely candidate on the basis of statistical or artificial intelligence techniques/models.

2. Basic Notions: Anaphora, Cataphora and Deixis Anaphora is a linguistic relation between two textual entities which is defined when a textual entity (the anaphor) refers to another entity of the text which usually occurs before (the antecedent). When the anaphor refers to an antecedent and both have the same referent in the real world, they are called co-referential. Although, coreference and anaphora are two different concepts, in reality, they most often co-occur except in some cases. Note that, not all varieties of anaphora are based on referring expressions such as verb anaphora in example 1 or bound anaphors in example 2. On the contrary, coreference may occur without anaphora. For example, the use of the same proper name consecutively with each one referring to the same entity. BCDE َGآ GIJK LMآ NOPQE RSَTEا VLWأ YDَZEا [َDه /hay~aOa Al$~ayoxu OaxaAhu AlS~abiy~a linawomihi kamaA yafoEalu kul~a layolapK/1 the old man prepared his brother for sleeping as he does each night وcId أRb RO اaMEه`BK أزهLرا صJ`اء LlmnPop واkiة Mi`اء /waDaEato Oum~iy fiy Almizohariy~api OazohaArFA SaforaA'a tatawas~aTuhaA waAHidapN HamoraA'a/ My mother puts in the vase yellow flowers and in the centre a red one. • Anaphora/ Cataphora: the anaphora is defined as being the resumption of an entity already evoked previously in the text, whereas, the cataphora occurs when a reference is made on an entity mentioned further in the text (e.g., “ LuّDi ك`uoK x تPuME . ” /huwa ا Puه Almawotu lAa yatoruku Hay~FA/ It is death that leaves no one alive). • Anaphora/deixis: the deixis is a linguistic phenomenon which identifies a person, an object, a place, etc. in a context or in a specific situation (e.g., “ أن RبLoآ ت}Wأ c ” /Oanota Oaxa*ota kitaAbiy/ you took my book). 3. Typology of Arabic Anaphors

www.textminingthequran.com/apps/pron.php

Quranic pronoun reference: