A Hybrid Approach for Anaphora Resolution in Hindi
Summary
The paper tackles automatic resolution of pronouns that refer to concrete entities in Hindi. Most earlier work relied on phrase-structure syntax. The authors instead use dependency analyses, which suit Hindi's relatively free word order. Their data comes from the Hindi/Urdu Dependency Treebank, annotated in the Computational Paninian Grammar (CPG) framework with karaka relations, plus animacy labels, Named Entity tags and anaphora links.
The system works in two stages. First, category-specific rules handle reflexive, relative, locative and personal pronouns by walking the dependency tree. For example, a reflexive is linked to the k1 dependent of its clause's verb, and a relative pronoun to the noun its nmod-relc clause modifies. Pronouns the rules cannot settle go to a decision-tree classifier that ranks candidate antecedents pairwise, using distance, agreement, animacy and NE features.
The rules alone reach 0.60 accuracy and are weak mainly on third-person pronouns. The full hybrid reaches 0.70. The work shows that dependency structure plus light semantic cues gives a practical route to anaphora resolution for Indian languages.
Key points
- Data: 325 treebank documents with 4970 pronouns, of which 3233 are entity pronouns, split roughly 2:1 into 2162 training and 1071 test pronouns.
- Rule-based accuracy by pronoun type:
- first/second person: 0.93
- relative: 0.85
- reflexive: 0.82
- locative: 0.77
- third person: 0.48
- overall: 0.60 (653/1071)
- Third-person pronouns are handled with a salience ordering of dependency relations (k1 > k2 > r6 > k4 > k3 > others), with candidates filtered by number and animacy.
- The classifier follows the Soon et al. (2001) pairwise scheme, considering candidates from up to 3 previous sentences. Adding distance, animacy and agreement features raises accuracy to 0.70 (753/1071).
- The authors give a tentative comparison, since the earlier systems' data was unavailable:
- Dakwale and Sharma (2011): 0.52 on 258 pronouns
- Uppalapu and Sharma (2009): 0.86 and 0.64 on 142 and 100 pronouns
Cited by
- A Generic Anaphora Resolution Engine for Indian Languages
- Multilingual Coreference Resolution in Low-resource South Asian Languages
Cite
@inproceedings{dakwale2013hybrid,
title = {{A Hybrid Approach for Anaphora Resolution in Hindi}},
author = {Dakwale, Praveen and Mujadia, Vandan and Sharma, Dipti M},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing},
year = {2013},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/I13-1130/}
}References
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