Getting Useful Gender Statistics from English Text
John Hale, Eugene Charniak · 1998
Gender, understood as a lexical feature, is important for anaphora because it narrows down the number of possible referents involved in a typical pronoun resolution situation. This work describes an automatic method for obtaining reliable guesses about the gender of entities in a corpus using free text. By using a simple but unreliable anaphora algorithm repeatedly over a large corpus, the probable genders of referenced entities can be compiled and given a salience ranking. These statistics are an inexpensive way to add on gender-feature information to a statistical anaphora resolution algorithm. Introduction Anaphora is the use of a grammatical substitute, such as a pronoun, to refer to a word or group of words mentioned earlier in the discourse. To the degree that the referred-to word or group of words denotes some entity in the world, the anaphoric reference to that entity also refers to that same real-world object. By way of this correspondence, groups of words denoting th...