Automatic Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in English Texts
Tyne Liang, Dian-Song Wu · 2004
Anaphora is a common phenomenon in discourses as well as an important research issue in the applications of natural language processing. In this paper, anaphora resolution is achieved by employing WordNet ontology and heuristic rules. The proposed system identifies both intra-sentential and inter-sentential antecedents of anaphors. Information about animacy is obtained by analyzing the hierarchical relations of nouns and verbs in the surrounding context. The identification of animacy entities and pleonastic-it usage in English discourses are employed to promote resolution accuracy. Traditionally, anaphora resolution systems have relied on syntactic, semantic or pragmatic clues to identify the antecedent of an anaphor. Our proposed method makes use of WordNet ontology to identify animate entities as well as essential gender information. In the animacy agreement module, the property is identified by the hypernym relation between entities and their unique beginners defined in WordNet. In addition, the verb of the entity is also an important clue used to reduce