The general context! The world, especially the United States, is deep in the global pandemic of COVID-19 virus. Virtually everyone's job is precarious.
The problem with your question and the sentence in the original post is that you will only get
an answer, not
the answer, if you don't look at the context using your knowledge about the world around you.
Trying to analyze the sentence by looking at the meaning of the words will not get you any closer to
the answer. You need a bigger picture. You need to understand what motifs and responsibilities each part involved has, understand the dynamic of the situation, deduce what the writer's intentions might be, and apply, how GoesStation put it,
common sense.
1. Why would the writer mention what's happened to the three officers if they later talk about what labor attorneys are doing?
2. Why would the writer mention two unrelated pieces of information? (The three officers being fired, and labor attorneys fighting for somebody's jobs)
3. Is the piece of writing about two separate stories or one story?
4. What do labor attorneys do? Do they commonly fight for others' rights, not their own, in their profession?
5. Is there a relation between what labor attorneys are doing and what's happened to the three officers?
6. Does
fight for used by the writer suggest anything about how the writer feels about the justness of the situation?
7. Have the three officers been treated rightfully?
There are many questions you can ask that may help you decide what
their refers to in this sentence.
Their is just a pronoun.
Their may well refer to any plural noun in this piece of writing.
Chauvin, who was also charged with manslaughter, is being held in a state prison. The other three officers[SUB]1[/SUB] on scene, like Chauvin, were fired the day after the incident but have not been charged.
The head of the Minneapolis police union said in a letter to members[SUB]2[/SUB] that the officers were fired without due process and labor attorneys[SUB]3[/SUB] are fighting for their[SUB]x[/SUB] jobs. Lt. Bob Kroll, the union president, also criticized city leadership, saying a lack of support is to blame for the days of sometimes violent protests.
Does
their refer to
officers,
members, or
attorneys? For a human being, given their command of the language used is sufficient to understand it, it should be obvious whose interests are what, and whose jobs labor attorneys may be fighting for. The big picture and the context clearly, I think, suggest what's going on (labor attorneys are fighting for the three officers' jobs). At the same time, looking at this sentence just in terms of the linguistic function of the words can give multiple possible answers.
When talking about artificial intelligence, there's a burning question nobody seems to agree on - can machines
understand language, or are they just unknowingly copying what humans do?
Machines are pretty good at distinguishing words by part of speech and function, can be great at understanding words by their definition, but ultimately fall flat when it comes to understanding the situation as a whole. A machine would have a difficult time trying to answer my questions (1-7); it would have a difficult time trying to understand who
their refers to in this sentence.
Machines are pretty good at unknowingly mimicking how humans use language, what words mean and even how to use grammar to show the relationship between them, but they are terrible at using or even detecting contextual clues. They haven't got any experience with the world around. They've never used the services of a labor attorney, and don't know anything about whether an authority's decision may or may not be morally right.
Winograd schemas are tests that are meant to help us judge whether a machine has managed to learn how to understand language. They use sentences like the one in the original post - the simplest Winograd schemas have a pronoun with multiple possible antecedents - to see if a machine can use contextual clues to understand the situation. Sentences like these are easy for humans to answer, but incredibly difficult for machines.
A machine may, for example, use something I will in my ignorance call
word proximity. In terms of "distance" between
their and the word it refers to measured in how many words there are between them,
attorneys is the closest word
their can refer to (the two are separated by just three words). A machine's algorithm may use that to decide that
their refers to
attorneys.
A human will look at the whole passage, ask themselves (even subconsciously) a series of questions similar to mine (1-7), and most likely say that
their refers to
officers.
The machine and the human are equally correct in what
their may refer to, but the point isn't in what is
possible, but in what is meant by the writer.
I personally try to avoid sentences like this one. They are confusing and sometimes require a fair bit of general knowledge to understand what's going on
