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<Paper uid="E99-1049">
  <Title>Pointing to Events</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Although there is an extensive body of research concerned with anaphora resolution (e.g. (Fox, 1987; Grosz et al., 1995)), event anaphora has been widely neglected. This paper describes the results of an empirical study regarding event reference. The experiment investigated event anaphora in narrative discourse via a sentence completion task. The results of the experiment suggest that the discourse structure established by an explanation or elaboration relation has an influence on whether the last mentioned event, previously mentioned events or a complex event is preferably referred to.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> First, a short introduction is given to the observation that reference by the demonstrative pronoun this can only be done to antecedents mentioned in segments at the right frontier of the discourse structure tree (Webber, 1991). Second, although the right frontier restriction is generally agreed on by researchers, it is still unclear what kind of information is actually stored on higher levels of the discourse tree. Segmented Discourse Structure Theory (SDRT) is introduced (Asher, 1993) and the predictions of this theory are discussed regarding event anaphora for two example discourses. These predictions are also compared with the predictions according to Webber (1991).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Neither theory adequately explains the results of the current experiment. Thus the presentation concludes with an outline of a proposed computational theory.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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