Pronominal Reference

The use of pronouns or pronoun-like expressions to refer back to entities previously introduced in a discourse. In spoken and written languages this is typically achieved with words such as "he," "she," "it," or "they"; in American Sign Language and other signed languages, pronominal reference is achieved by pointing to a location in the signing space that has been associated with the entity earlier in the discourse — which means the signer's conversational partner must remember which location was assigned to which entity. For accessibility technology, modelling pronominal reference is a core requirement for signing-avatar systems, screen-reader prosody, text-simplification tools that rewrite pronouns for clarity, and assistive captioning.