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An Algorithm for Anaphora Resolution in Spanish Texts

Summary

The paper addresses automatic pronominal anaphora resolution in unrestricted Spanish text: linking a pronoun to the noun phrase it refers to. It covers third-person personal pronouns (clitic, inside a PP, or outside one), demonstratives, reflexives, and zero pronouns. Zero pronouns are omitted subjects and are the most common anaphoric form in Spanish. The resolver runs on partial parses from the slot unification parser (SUP) and finds antecedents both within and across sentences. Each pronoun type gets its own rules. Hard constraints remove candidates first: agreement in person, gender and number, plus new syntactic noncoreference conditions adapted to partial parsing, based on Reinhart's c-command and on Lappin and Leass. Corpus-derived heuristic preferences then rank the remaining candidates. The authors also measure how much lexical, morphological, syntactic and statistical knowledge each contributes. On 1,677 pronouns the algorithm reaches 76.8% success. Four competing algorithms were reimplemented and blind-tested on the same corpus. The method uses no semantic information and is presented as portable to languages such as English, Portuguese, Italian and Japanese.

Key points

  • Covers personal (clitic, in-PP, not-in-PP), demonstrative, reflexive and omitted (zero) pronouns. Zero pronouns are the most frequent anaphor type in Spanish and appear only in subject position.
  • The pipeline is type identification, then filtering by morphological agreement and syntactic noncoreference conditions, then preference ranking. Agreement is checked by unifying slot structures in SUP.
  • Partial parsing analyses only NPs, PPs, verbal chunks, pronouns and "free conjunctions." Clauses are split on these conjunctions and on verbs. Zero-pronoun detection by this approach was reported earlier at 88% (Ferrández and Peral 2000).
  • Evaluation used 1,677 pronouns and gave a 76.8% success rate.
  • Four alternative anaphora resolution algorithms were reimplemented for Spanish and compared in a blind test on the same corpus.

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

13 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 10 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1162/089120101753342662

@article{palomar2001algorithm,
  title = {{An Algorithm for Anaphora Resolution in Spanish Texts}},
  author = {Palomar, Manuel and Ferrández, Antonio and Moreno, Lidia and Martínez-Barco, Patricio and Peral, Jesús and Saiz-Noeda, Maximiliano and Muñoz, Rafael},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2001},
  doi = {10.1162/089120101753342662},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/089120101753342662}
}

References

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