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Anaphora Resolution: A Multi-Strategy Approach

Summary

Carbonell and Brown address intersentential anaphora: pronouns and similar expressions whose antecedents appear in earlier utterances. Resolving these depends heavily on semantic and pragmatic knowledge, not only on syntax. They argue against a single monolithic resolver. Instead, they propose combining several independent strategies, each based on a different knowledge source, such as sentence syntax, case-frame semantics, dialog structure, and world knowledge. Some strategies are hard constraints that eliminate candidates. Others are preferences that rank the remaining ones.

The approach was implemented in CMU's Universal Parser, a machine-translation architecture. It was tested on a small set of constructed everyday-event discourses, such as giving aspirin, taking a cake, and characters going up a hill. These examples were modeled on phenomena seen in real human-computer interface dialogs.

The main claim concerns cognitive plausibility. Where the strategies agree, human subjects pick the same single referent. Where the strategies propose conflicting candidates, humans also find the reference ambiguous. The work matters because it offers a modular, practical way to handle broader anaphora classes than earlier limited-domain systems.

Key points

  • Constraint strategies remove candidates:
    • local anaphor constraints (number, gender, case)
    • case-role semantic constraints, e.g., the object of "eat" should be edible
    • precondition/postcondition constraints, e.g., after "give," the giver no longer holds the object
  • Preference strategies rank candidates. Case-role persistence favors the antecedent that filled the same semantic case role, such as recipient, earlier. Semantic alignment favors keeping the same underlying action roles, such as source vs. destination for "there."
  • The authors state that case-role persistence had not been proposed or implemented before their work, yet it accounts for many resolutions in their sample.
  • Earlier systems such as RUS and XCALIBUR implemented only rudimentary variants of some of these strategies.
  • Implementation traces show candidates being filtered and scored step by step. Agreement among several strategies on one referent increases confidence. No quantitative accuracy figures are reported in the available text.

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

38 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 14 of them have a page here, 24 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{carbonell1988anaphora,
  title = {{Anaphora Resolution: A Multi-Strategy Approach}},
  author = {Carbonell, Jaime G. and Brown, Ralf D.},
  booktitle = {Coling Budapest 1988 Volume 1: International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1988},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/C88-1021/}
}

References

18 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  3. Bresnan, J. and Kaplan, R. Lexical-Functional Grammar: A Formal System for Grammatical Representation. The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982, pages 173-281. i00 find
  4. Carbonell, L G. Towards a Process Model of Human Personality Traits. AI 15(1,2):49-74, November, 1980. find
  5. Carbonell, L G. and Hayes, P. J. Natural Language Understanding. In Shapiro, S. C. (editor), Encyclopedia of Arttficial Intelligence, pages 660-677, Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, 1987. find
  6. Carbonell, J. G., and Tomita, M. Knowledge-Based Machine Translation, The CMU Approach. In Nirenberg, S. (editor), Machine Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Issues. Cambridge, U. Press, 1987. find
  7. Carbonell, L G., Boggs, W. M., Mauldin. M. L. and Anick, P.G. The XCALIBUR Project, A Natural Language Interface to Expert Systems and Data Bases. In S. Andriole (editor), Applications in Artificial Intelligence. PetroceUi Books Inc., 1985. find
  8. Carbonell, 1. G. Discourse Pragmatics in Task-Oriented Natural Language Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 21st annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. ACL-83, 1983. find
  9. Charniak, E. Towards a Model of Children's Story Comprehension. PhD thesis, M.I.T., 1972. find
  10. Fillmore, C. J. The Case for Case. In Bach, E. and Harms, R. T. (editors), The Universals of Linguistic Theory, pages 1-88. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1968. find
  11. Grosz, B. J. The Representation and Use of Focus in Dialogue Understanding. PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1977. SRI Tech. Note 151. find
  12. Hayes, P. J. and Carbonell, J. G. A Natural Language Processing Tutorial. Technical Report, Carnegie-Mellon University, Computer Science Department, 1983. find
  13. Hayes, P. J. Anaphora for Limited Domain Systems. In Proceedings of the Seventh IJCAI, pages 416-422. Vancouver, BC, 198 I. find
  14. Hobbs, J. R. A Computational Approach to Discourse Analysis. Technical Report 76-2, Department of Computer Science, City College, City U. of NY, 1976. find
  15. Sidner, C. L. Focusing for Interpretation of Pronouns. Journal of Computational Linguisties 7:217-231, 1981. find
  16. Tomita, M. and Carbonell, J. G. The Universal Parser Architecture for Knowledge-Based Machine Translation. In Proceedings oflJCAI-87. Milan, Italy, 1987. find
  17. Webber, B. and Reiter, R. Anaphora and Locial Form: On Formal Meaning Representations for Natural Langauge. In Proceedings of the Fifth IJCAI, pages 121-131. Cambridge, MA, 1977. find
  18. Wilks, Y. Knowledge Structures and Language Boundaries. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Art~ciallntelligence, pages 151-157. IJCAI-V, 1977. Notes llnterclausal anaphora in coordinate constructions behaves much like a constrained version of intersentential anaphora, wher… find

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