@InProceedings{hardmeier-EtAl:2018:NEWS2018,
  author    = {Hardmeier, Christian  and  Bevacqua, Luca  and  Loáiciga, Sharid  and  Rohde, Hannah},
  title     = {Forms of Anaphoric Reference to Organisational Named Entities: Hoping to widen appeal, they diversified},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh Named Entities Workshop},
  month     = {July},
  year      = {2018},
  address   = {Melbourne, Australia},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {36--40},
  abstract  = {Proper names of organisations are a special case of collective nouns. Their meaning can be conceptualised as a collective unit or as a plurality of persons, allowing for different morphological marking of coreferent anaphoric pronouns. This paper explores the variability of references to organisation names with 1) a corpus analysis and 2) two crowd-sourced story continuation experiments. The first shows that the preference for singular vs. plural conceptualisation is dependent on the level of formality of a text. In the second, we observe a strong preference for the plural they otherwise typical of informal speech. Using edited corpus data instead of constructed sentences as stimuli reduces this preference.},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W18-2406}
}