Pronoun resolution made simple: a robust, knowledge-poor approach in action

Ruslan Mitkov, Lamia Belguith

Abstract : Most traditional approaches to anaphora resolution rely heavily on linguistic and domain knowledge. One of the disadvantages of developing a knowledge-based system, however, is that it is a very labour-intensive and time-consuming task. This paper presents a robust, knowledge-poor approach to resolving pronouns in technical manuals. This approach is a modification of the practical approach (reported in Mitkov 1998a) and operates on texts pre-processed by a part-of-speech tagger. Input is checked against agreement and tested for a number of antecedent indicators. Candidates are assigned scores by each indicator and the candidate with the highest aggregate score is returned as the antecedent. The approach can be regarded as multilingual 1 : the English version gave good results when used directly for Arabic and minimum modification produced an Arabic version with a still better perform-ance. Preliminary evaluation reports high success rates in the range of and over 90%.

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