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Robust Pronoun Resolution with Limited Knowledge

Summary

Classic anaphora resolution systems depend on rich syntactic, semantic and domain knowledge, which is expensive to build and slow to run. Mitkov proposes a lightweight alternative for resolving pronouns in technical manuals that needs only part-of-speech tagged text and simple noun-phrase rules, with no full parsing.

For each pronoun, the system:

  • gathers noun phrases to its left within the current and two previous sentences,
  • discards candidates that fail gender/number agreement, using a hand-built list of agreement exceptions,
  • scores the remaining candidates with empirically chosen "antecedent indicators" such as definiteness, givenness, lexical reiteration, collocation patterns, referential distance and term status.

The highest total score wins, and fixed tie-breaking rules settle equal scores.

On English manuals the method resolved 89.7% of pronouns. This beat two baselines and a manually simulated CogNIAC. Ported to Polish and Arabic with small changes, it scored even higher. The work shows that cheap, preference-based heuristics can be robust and fairly portable across languages, at least within a restricted genre.

Key points

  • Each indicator assigns a candidate a score of -1, 0, 1 or 2. Ties are broken by immediate reference, then collocation, then indicating verbs, and finally recency.
  • English results: 89.7% success, versus 31.55%/48.55% (recall/precision) for a most-recent-subject baseline and 65.95% for a most-recent-NP baseline. CogNIAC ("resolve all", simulated manually) reached 75%.
  • The most discriminative indicators were immediate reference (100%), non-prepositional NP (92.2%) and collocation (90.9%). The most frequently applied was referential distance (98.9% of anaphors).
  • Polish adaptation: evaluated on 180 pronouns from online technical manuals, 120 of them exophoric. It reached 93.3% success (critical success rate 86.2%), compared with baselines of 23.7% and 68.4%.
  • Arabic adaptation: 95.2% success (critical 89.3%) on 63 anaphors from a Sony technical manual.

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

78 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 25 of them have a page here, 53 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/980691.980712

@inproceedings{mitkov1998robust,
  title = {{Robust Pronoun Resolution with Limited Knowledge}},
  author = {Mitkov, Ruslan},
  booktitle = {36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Volume 2},
  year = {1998},
  doi = {10.3115/980691.980712},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/980691.980712}
}

References

23 references, 8 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Baldwin, Breck. 1997. "CogNIAC: high precision coreference with limited knowledge and linguistic resources". Proceedings of the ACL'97/EACL'97 workshop on Operational factors in practical, robust anaphora resolution, 38-45, Madrid, Spain. find our card
  2. Brennan, S., M. Fridman and C. Pollard. 1987. A centering approach to pronouns. Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the ACL (ACL'87), 155-162, Stanford, CA, USA. find
  3. Carbonell, James G. & Ralf D. Brown. 1988. "Anaphora resolution: a multi-strategy approach". Proceedings of the 12. International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING'88), Vol.I. 96-101, Budapest, Hungary. find our card
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  6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Hobbs, Jerry R. 1978 "Resolving pronoun references". Lingua, 44, 339-352. find our card
  7. Ingria, Robert J.P. & David Stallard. 1989. "A computational mechanism for pronominal reference". Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the ACL, 262-271, Vancouver, British Columbia. find
  8. Internet Manual. 1994. Translation of Internet Manual lnternet i okolice: Przewodnik po swiatowych sieciach komputerowych. Tracy LaQuey, Jeanne C. Ryer Translated by Monika Zielinska, BIZNET Poland. find
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  10. Kennedy, Christopher & Branimir Boguraev, 1996. "Anaphora for everyone: pronominal anaphora resolution without a parser". Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING'96), 113-118. find our card
  11. Copenhagen, Denmark Lappin, Shalom & Michael McCord. 1990. "Anaphora resolution in slot grammar". Computational Linguistics, 16:4, 197-212. find our card
  12. Lappin, Shalom & Herbert Leass. 1994. "An algorithm for pronominal anaphora resolution". Computational Linguistics, 20(4), 535-561. find our card
  13. Minolta. 1994. Minolta Operator's Manual for Photocopier EP5325. Technical Manual Minolta Camera Co., Ltd., Business Equipment Division 3-13, 2-Chome, Azuchi, -Machi, Chuo-Ku, Osaka 541, Japan Mitkov, Ruslan. 1994. "An integrated model for anaphora resolution". Proceedings of the 15th International… find our card
  14. Mitkov, Ruslan. 1995. "Un uncertainty reasoning approach for anaphora resolution". Proceedings of the Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium (NLPRS'95), 149-154, Seoul, Korea. find
  15. Mitkov, Ruslan. 1998a. "Pronoun resolution: the practical alternative". In T. McEnery, S. Botley(Eds) Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution. find
  16. John Benjamins. Mitkov, Ruslan. 1998b. "Evaluating anaphora resolution approaches". Proceedings of the Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium (DAARC'2), (forthcoming) Lancaster, UK Mitkov, Ruslan & Malgorzata Stys. 1997. "Robust reference resolution with limited knowledge: high precis… find
  17. Mitkov, Ruslan & Lamia Belguith. 1998. "Pronoun resolution made simple: a robust, knowledge-poor approach in action". Proceedings of the International Conference "Traduction Automatique et Langage Naturel" (TALN'98) (forthcoming). find
  18. Paris, France. Rich, Elaine & Susann LuperFoy. 1988. "An architecture for anaphora resolution". Proceedings of the Second Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing (ANLP-2), 18-24, Texas, U.S.A. find our card
  19. Sidner, Candy L. 1979. Towards a computational theory of definite anaphora comprehension in English discourse. Technical Report No. 537. M.I.T., Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. find
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  21. Stylewriter 1994. Portable StyleWriter. User's guide. Apple Computers. find
  22. Tin, Erkan & Varol, Akman. 1994. "Situated processing of pronominal anaphora". Proceedings of the KONVENS"94 Conference, 369-378, Webber, Bonnie L. 1979. A formal approach to discourse anaphora. London: Garland Publishing. find
  23. Williams, Sandra, Mark Harvey & Keith Preston. 1996. "Rule-based reference resolution for unrestricted text using part-of-speech tagging and noun phrase parsing". Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution (DAARC), 441-456. Lancaster, UK. find

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