Natural language texts are used extensively in a range of
The discourse-level phenomenon dealt with in this article information science tasks. Such use requires increased attention to discourse level linguistic phenomena which can be most inclusively referred to as discourse anaphora.
have the potential for impact on these tasks. One such This use of the term anaphora reflects common usage in device, anaphoric reference, was investigated in a fre-discourse linguistics rather than that of Chomsky and linquently used text type, namely, scientific abstracts.
guists of the transformational grammar school who use the Descriptive data on the extent of use of discourse anaph-term anaphor in a more narrowly defined sense. While ora in abstracts was gathered and rules for distinguishing anaphoric functioning of terms were compiled and Chomsky is concerned with determining the exact conditested. Results show a mean use of 3.67 functioning tions under which pronouns function within one sentence, anaphors per abstract in a random sample of 600 ab-our concern is with all anaphoric-type references, whether stracts from two databases. Testing of rules indicates within or across sentence boundaries. Discourse anaphora high feasibility of future algorithmic recognition of ana-can be defined as abbreviated subsequent reference and is phoric uses of terms.
most commonly exemplified by, but not limited to, the use of pronouns. Examples of discourse anaphora can be seen in