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A Public Reference Implementation of the RAP Anaphora Resolution Algorithm

Summary

Comparing anaphora resolution systems has been difficult, partly because few reference implementations were openly available. The authors address this gap with JavaRAP, a freely distributed Java version of the classic Resolution of Anaphora Procedure (RAP) by Lappin and Leass (1994). The system handles third person pronouns and lexical anaphors (reflexives and reciprocals), and it flags pleonastic "it" by matching a set of surface patterns. The original RAP relied on McCord's Slot Grammar parser. JavaRAP instead takes output from the public Charniak (2000) parser. It reconstructs the grammatical roles and head–argument/adjunct relations that RAP requires using hand-written rules over the parse tree. Candidates are filtered on agreement and syntactic constraints, then ranked by salience weights. The release also includes a sentence splitter and a scoring tool, which together support end-to-end runs and evaluation. On MUC-6 coreference data, JavaRAP reaches 57.9% accuracy, which is close to an earlier proprietary RAP implementation. This makes JavaRAP a practical baseline for future comparative work.

Key points

  • Input and output: JavaRAP reads Charniak parser output. It produces anaphor–antecedent pairs, or it can annotate or substitute anaphors directly in the text.
  • Agreement features: Gender and animacy come from the U.S. Census male/female first-name lists. Values marked unknown are treated as compatible with anything.
  • Pleonastic detection: Seven RAP patterns (e.g., "it is Modaladj that S") are applied using the original modal adjective and cognitive verb lists.
  • Evaluation: On the MUC-6 coreference training set, JavaRAP resolved 136 of 235 anaphors correctly (57.9%). For comparison, Preiss (2002) reported 61% for a RAP implementation evaluated on the BNC, also with the Charniak parser.
  • Availability: The tool is free to download from www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~qiul/NLPTools. It ships with a rule-based sentence splitter and a comparator for MUC-6-style gold annotations.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Coreference resolution

Cited by

17 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 8 of them have a page here, 9 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. arXiv cs/0406031

@inproceedings{qiu2004public,
  title = {{A Public Reference Implementation of the RAP Anaphora Resolution Algorithm}},
  author = {Qiu, Long and Kan, Min-Yen and Chua, Tat-Seng},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'04)},
  year = {2004},
  doi = {10.63317/4x8aozctr2rb},
  eprint = {cs/0406031},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4x8aozctr2rb}
}

References

7 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Charniak, E. (2000). A Maximum-Entropy-Inspired Parser. In Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL'2000), Seattle, Washington. find our card
  2. Kennedy, C. and Boguraev, B. (1996). Anaphora for Everyone: Pronominal Anaphora Resolution without a Parser. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-96). Vol. I, pp. 113-118. find our card
  3. Lappin, S. and Leass, H. J. (1994). An Algorithm for Pronominal Anaphora Resolution. Computational Linguistics, 20(4),535-561. find our card
  4. McCord, M. (1990). Slot Grammar: A System for Simpler Construction of Practical Natural Language Grammars. In Natural Language and Logic: International Scientific Symposium. (Ed:Studer, R.), pp. 118-145. Lecture notes in Computer Science, Berlin: Sprlnger-Verlg. find
  5. Mitkov, R. (2000). Towards More Comprehensive Evaluation in Anaphora Resolution. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, vol.3, pp. 1309-1314, Athens, Greece. find
  6. Preiss, J. (2002). Choosing a Parser for Anaphora Resolution. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution (DAARC, 2002), pp. 175-180. find
  7. Vicedo, J. L. and Ferrández, A. (2000). Importance of Pronominal Anaphora resolution in Question Answering systems. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Hong Kong, China. find our card

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