Abducing Coreference by Model Construction
Peter Baumgartner, Michael H. Kuhn · 2007
Abstract. In this paper, we argue that the resolution of anaphoric expressions in an utterance is essentially an abductive task following [HSAM93] who use a weighted abduction scheme on horn clauses to deal with reference. We give a semantic representation for utterances containing anaphora that enables us to compute possible antecedents by abductive inference. We extend the disjunctive model construction procedure of hyper tableaux [BFN96, Küh97] with a clause transformation turning the abductive task into a model generation problem and show the completeness of this transformation with respect to the computation of abuctive explanations. This abductive inference is applied to the resolution of anaphoric expressions in our general model constructing framework for incremental discourse representation [Küh99] which we argue to be useful for computing information updates from natural language utterances [Vel96]. 1