A Statistical Approach to Anaphora Resolution

Abstract

This paper presents an algorithm for identifying pronominal anaphora and two experiments based upon this algorithm. We incorporate multiple anaphora resolution factors into a statistical framework | speci cally the distance between the pronoun and the proposed antecedent, gender/number/animaticity of the proposed antecedent, governing head information and noun phrase repetition. We combine them into a single probability that enables us to identify the referent. Our rst experiment shows the relative contribution of each source of information and demonstrates a success rate of 82.9% for all sources combined. The second experiment investigates a method for unsupervised learning of gender/number/animaticity information. We present some experiments illustrating the accuracy of the method and note that with this information added, our pronoun resolution method achieves 84.2% accuracy. 1 Introduction We present a statistical method for determining pronoun anaphora. This program diers from...