In dialog, the participants rarely use the lexical noun phrase to access the referent once the referent has been evoked. They use pronouns in the lexical subject position. It is often the case however that, the same subject is re-introduced at some point later in the conversation. In general, however, once the referent has been evoked, there should be no reason to not use the pronouns to keep referring back to the same referent. In this project, I study the reasons for participants in dialog to switch to lexical noun phrases for pronominal phrases. I also want to see if there is any universality in this case and try to predict the minimum number of turns before a subject is reintroduced. My assumption is that, if a subject is reintroduced out of turn, it may lead to confusion in the listener.
Data : Switchboard Corpus at https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/docs/LDC97S62/
Switchboard Corpus Parser from http://compprag.christopherpotts.net/swda.html