Processing definite descriptions in corpora
Renata La Rocca Vieira, Massimo Poesio · Studies in corpus linguistics · 2000
We discuss in this paper a system that resolves definite descriptions in written texts. A preliminary study of definite descriptions in a collection of 20 texts revealed that about 30% of the 1040 definites in the collection were cases of anaphoric definites whose antecedents had the same head noun, and 50% introduced novel discourse referents. An algorithm which resolves anaphoric definite descriptions and also identifies novel ones is proposed. We evaluated the algorithm by comparing its results with an annotation produced by human subjects. The analysis of the corpus, the implemented algorithm, and the evaluation of the results are presented in this paper. 1 Introduction We are interested in definite description resolution techniques and their quantitative evaluation. We discuss in this paper a system that resolves definite descriptions (DDs) (noun phrases headed by the definite article, such as the car) in written texts. Our algorithms use linguistic information but do not make us...