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Employing the Centering Theory in Pronoun Resolution from the Semantic Perspective

Summary

Centering theory explains how discourse focus shifts between utterances. Earlier attempts to use it for pronoun resolution, such as S-list features in learning-based systems, gave little benefit or even lowered F-measure. Kong, Zhou and Zhu argue that the problem lies in applying centering at the grammatical level, using subject/object ranking. They reformulate it at the semantic level instead. Semantic roles such as agent (ARG0) and patient are assigned with respect to the different predicates in a sentence. From these roles the authors derive centering-motivated features for a pronoun resolver:

  • semantic role features that model whether the local focus continues or shifts;
  • a ranking feature that places each pronoun among the sentence's pronouns by semantic role and surface position;
  • fine-grained pronoun subcategory features that make the other two features more discriminative.

On the ACE 2003 corpus (NWIRE, NPAPER and BNEWS), these features consistently improve F-measure over a strong baseline. The gains hold for pronouns with antecedents in the same sentence and in earlier sentences. The authors present this as the first successful semantic-level use of centering for pronoun resolution.

Key points

  • Overall pronoun resolution F-measure rises from 62.3 to 65.9 on NWIRE, from 65.3 to 69.8 on NPAPER, and from 59.0 to 66.7 on BNEWS.
  • Adding the relative pronominal ranking feature on top of the semantic role features yields +1.1, +3.0 and +5.5 F on the three domains. It helps most where antecedents tend to lie further back in the text.
  • Third-person pronoun F-measure improves by 8.3 on NWIRE, 0.9 on NPAPER and 4.7 on BNEWS. Reflexive pronouns drop on NPAPER, but they are rare in the corpus.
  • Gains appear at sentence distances of 0, 1 and 2, ranging from +2.7 to +12.5 F. This shows the features help both within and across sentences.
  • Pronoun subcategory features used alone hurt performance. They become useful only when combined with the semantic role and ranking features.

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 · Semantic role labeling

Cited by

10 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 6 of them have a page here, 4 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{kong2009employing,
  title = {{Employing the Centering Theory in Pronoun Resolution from the Semantic Perspective}},
  author = {Kong, Fang and Zhou, GuoDong and Zhu, Qiaoming},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2009},
  doi = {10.3115/1699571.1699641},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1699571.1699641}
}

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