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Anaphora Resolution in Slot Grammar

Summary

The paper tackles anaphora resolution as a post-parsing step in Slot Grammar, a lexicalist, dependency-oriented formalism developed at IBM. The authors build three Prolog modules that run on the output of the English Slot Grammar (ESG) parser:

  • an interpreter for elliptical VPs,
  • a syntactic filter that rules out pronoun–NP coreference within a sentence,
  • a procedure that finds possible binders for reflexives and reciprocals.

Parse trees are first turned into ground unit clauses (for example hasarg, phmarker and pharg). These rely on the marker-variable unifications the parser has already made. The VP algorithm works directly on surface parse structure (S-structure) rather than logical form (LF). It copies the antecedent verb into the ellipsis site and decides which arguments and adjuncts carry over. The two NP rules then apply to the reconstructed trees.

Together, the NP rules cover roughly the same ground as Chomsky's binding theory, without needing empty categories or binding chains. The paper shows illustrative outputs rather than quantitative evaluation. The resulting module produces partially interpreted representations that can feed later semantic and discourse processing.

Key points

  • There are three independent, combinable algorithms: VP ellipsis, the pronominal noncoreference filter and anaphor binding. In the integrated system, the NP rules apply after VP interpretation.
  • The VP ellipsis analysis covers three kinds of structure: antecedent-contained deletion, subdeletion and intersentential cases. It yields the "sloppy" reading of reflexives, while the "strict" reading would require copying marker variables.
  • ESG draws on two lexicons:
    • a hand-coded lexicon of about 3,700 words;
    • UDICT, with over 60,000 lemmas, connected through a heuristic interface.
  • The parser is a bottom-up chart parser whose parse evaluation extends Heidorn's (1982) metric. It uses this evaluation to prune unlikely partial parses during parsing. It is linked to the LMT machine translation system.
  • Slot Grammars were also being developed for Danish (DSG, by Arendse Bernth) and German (GSG, by Ulrike Schwall).

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

19 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 4 of them have a page here, 15 not yet.

Cite

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

@misc{lappin1990anaphora,
  title = {{Anaphora Resolution in Slot Grammar}},
  author = {Lappin, Shalom and McCord, Michael},
  year = {1990},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J90-4001/}
}

References

47 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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