Abstract

Encapsulators are linguistic units which establish coherent referential connections to the preceding discourse in a text. In this paper, we address the challenge of automatically analysing the pronominal encapsulator ello in Spanish text. Our method identifies, for each occurrence, the antecedent of the pronoun (including its grammatical type), the connective phrase which combines with the pronoun to express a discourse relation linking the antecedent text segment to the following text segment, and the type of semantic relation expressed by the complex discourse marker formed by the connective phrase and pronoun. We describe our annotation of a corpus to inform the development of our method and to finetune an automatic analyser based on bidirectional encoder representation transformers. On testing our method, we find that it performs with greater accuracy than three baselines (0.76 for the resolution task), and sets a promising benchmark for the automatic annotation of occurrences of the pronoun ello, their antecedents, and the semantic relations between the two text segments linked by the connective in combination with the pronoun.