Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Multilingual Anaphora Resolution

  • Published:
Machine Translation

Abstract

This paper presents amultilingual robust, knowledge-poor approach to resolvingpronouns in technical manuals. This approach is a modification of the practicalapproach (Mitkov 1998a) and operates on texts pre-processed by apart-of-speech tagger. Input is checked against agreementand a number of antecedent indicators. Candidates are assigned scores by eachindicator and the candidate with the highest aggregate score isreturned as the antecedent. We propose this approach as aplatform for multilingual pronoun resolution. The robust approach was initiallydeveloped and tested for English, but we have also adaptedand tested it for Polish and Arabic. For bothlanguages, we found that adaptation required minimummodification and that further, even if used unmodified, the approachdelivers acceptable success rates. Preliminary evaluation reports high successrates in the range of over 90%.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Abraços, José and José Gabriel Lopes: 1994, ‘Extending DRT with a Focusing Mechanism for Pronominal Anaphora and Ellipsis Resolution’, COLING 94: The 15th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Kyoto, Japan, pp. 1128-1132.

  • Baldwin, Breck: 1997, ‘CogNIAC: High Precision Coreference with Limited Knowledge and Linguistic Resources’, Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution: Proceedings of a Workshop, Madrid, Spain, pp. 38-45.

  • Brennan, S., M. Fridman and C. Pollard: 1987, ‘A Centering Approach to Pronouns’, 25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Stanford, CA, pp. 155-162.

  • Carbonell, James G. and Ralf D. Brown: 1988, ‘Anaphora Resolution: A Multi-Strategy Approach’, Coling Budapest: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Budapest, pp. 96-101.

  • Carter, David M.: 1987, Interpreting Anaphora in Natural Language Texts, Ellis Horwood, Chichester.

    Google Scholar 

  • Connolly, Dennis, John D. Burger and David S. Day: 1997, ‘A Machine Learning Approach to Anaphoric Reference’, in D. B. Jones And H. L. Somers (eds), New Methods in Language Processing, UCL Press, London, pp. 133-144.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dagan, Ido and Alon Itai: 1990, ‘Automatic Processing of Large Corpora for the Resolution of Anaphora References’, COLING-90: Papers Presented to the 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Vol. 3, Helsinki, Finland, pp. 1-3.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dagan, Ido, John Justeson, Shalom Lappin, Herbert Leass and Amnon Ribak: 1995, ‘Syntax and Lexical Statistics in Anaphora Resolution’, Applied Artificial Intelligence 9, 633-644.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dunker, Guido and Carla Umbach: 1993, ‘Verfahren zur Anaphernresolution in KIT-FAST’ [Experiments in Anaphora Resolution in KIT-FAST], Internal Report KIT-28, Technische Universität Berlin.

  • Firbas, Jan: 1992, Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fischer, Ingrid, Bernd Geistert and Gunter Görz: 1996, ‘Incremental Anaphora Resolution in a Chart-Based Semantics Construction Framework Using l-DRT’, Approaches to Discourse Anaphora: Proceedings of the Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium (DAARC96), Lancaster, England, pp. 235-244.

  • Fraurud, Kari: 1988, ‘Pronoun Resolution in Unrestricted Text’, Nordic Journal of Linguistics 11, 47-68.

    Google Scholar 

  • Galaini, Chikh Mustafa: 1992, Jami'u al-durus al-arabiah [Collection of Arabic Lessons], Manshurat al-maktabah al-asriyah, Beirut.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hobbs, Jerry R.: 1978, ‘Resolving Pronoun References’, Lingua 44, 339-352.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ingria, Robert J. P. and David Stallard: 1989, ‘A Computational Mechanism for Pronominal Reference’, 27th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vancouver, British Columbia, pp. 262-271.

  • Kennedy, Christopher and Branimir Boguraev: 1996, ‘Anaphora for Everyone: Pronominal Anaphora Resolution without a Parser’, COLING-96: The 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp. 113-118.

  • Lappin, Shalom and Herbert Leass: 1994, ‘An Algorithm for Pronominal Anaphora Resolution’, Computational Linguistics 20, 535-561.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lappin, Shalom and Michael McCord: 1990, ‘Anaphora Resolution in Slot Grammar’, Computational Linguistics 16, 197-212.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leass, Herbert and Ulrike Schwall: 1991, An Anaphora Resolution Procedure for Machine Translation, Report 172, IBM Germany Science Center, Institute for Knowledge Based Systems, Heidelberg.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mitkov, Ruslan: 1994, ‘An Integrated Model for Anaphora Resolution’, COLING 94: The 15th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Kyoto, Japan, pp. 1170-1176.

  • Mitkov, Ruslan: 1995, ‘An Uncertainty Reasoning Approach for Anaphora Resolution’, Proceedings of the Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium, NLPRS '95, Seoul, Korea, pp. 149-154.

  • Mitkov, Ruslan: 1996, ‘Pronoun Resolution: The Practical Alternative’, Approaches to Discourse Anaphora: Proceedings of the Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium (DAARC96); to appear in T. McEnery and S. Botley (eds), Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution, John Benjamins, Amsterdam.

  • Mitkov, Ruslan: 1998, ‘Evaluating Anaphora Resolution Approaches’, New Approaches to Discourse Anaphora: Proceedings of the Second Colloquium on Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution (DAARC2), Lancaster, England, pp. 164-177.

  • Mitkov, Ruslan, Lamia Belguith and Małgorzata Stýs: 1998, ‘Multilingual Robust Anaphora Resolution’, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-3), Granada, Spain, pp. 7-16.

  • Mori, Tatsunori, Mamoru Matsuo and Hiroshi Nakagawa: 1997, ‘Constraints and Defaults of Zero Pronouns in Japanese Instruction Manuals’, Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution: Proceedings of a Workshop, Madrid, Spain, pp. 7-13.

  • Nakaiwa, Hiromi and Satoru Ikehara: 1992, ‘Zero Pronoun Resolution in a Japanese-to-English Machine Translation system by Using Verbal Semantic Attributes’, Third Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, Trento, Italy, pp. 201-208.

  • Nakaiwa, Hiromi and Satoru Ikehara: 1995, ‘Intrasentential Resolution of Japanese Zero Pronouns in a Machine Translation System Using Semantic and Pragmatic Constraints’, Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation TMI 95, Leuven, Belgium, pp. 96-105.

  • Nakaiwa, Hiromi, Francis Bond, Takahiro Uekado and Yayoi Nozawa: 1996, ‘Resolving Zero Pronouns in Texts Using Textual Structure’, NeMLaP-2: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on New Methods in Language Processing, Ankara, Turkey, pp. 25-36.

  • Nakaiwa, Hiromi, S. Shirai, Satoru Ikehara and T. Kawaoka: 1995, ‘Extrasentential Resolution of Japanese Zero Pronouns Using Semantic and Pragmatic Constraints’, Proceedings of the AAAI 1995 Spring Symposium Series: Empirical Methods in Discourse Interpretation and Generation, Stanford, California, pp. 99-105.

  • Nasukawa, Tetsuya: 1994, ‘Robust Method of Pronoun Resolution Using Full-Text Information’, COLING 94: The 15th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Kyoto, Japan, pp. 1157-1163.

  • Popescu-Belis, Andrei and Isabelle Robba: 1997, ‘Cooperation between Pronoun and Reference Resolution for Unrestricted Texts’, Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution: Proceedings of a Workshop, Madrid, Spain, pp. 30-37.

  • Rich, Elaine and Susann LuperFoy: 1988, ‘An architecture for anaphora resolution’, 2nd Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, Austin, TX, pp. 18-24.

  • Rolbert, Monique: 1989, Résolution de formes pronominales dans l'interface d'intérrogation d'une base de données [Resolution of pronominal forms in a database interrogation interface], Thèse de doctorat, Faculté des Sciences de Luminy, France.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sidner, Candy L.: 1979, Towards a Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse, Technical Report No. 537, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT.

  • Stuckardt, Roland: 1996, ‘An Interdependency-sensitive Approach to Anaphor Resolution’, Approaches to Discourse Anaphora: Proceedings of the Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium (DAARC96), Lancaster, England, pp. 400-413.

  • Stuckardt, Roland: 1997, ‘Resolving Anaphoric References on Deficient Syntactic Descriptions’, Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution: Proceedings of a Workshop, Madrid, Spain, pp. 30-37.

  • Tin, Erkan and Varol Akman: 1994, ‘Situated Processing of Pronominal Anaphora’, Proceedings of the KONVENS '94 Conference, Vienna, Austria, pp. 369-378.

  • Wakao, Takahiro: 1994, ‘Reference Resolution Using Semantic Patterns in Japanese Newspaper Articles’, COLING 94: The 15th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Kyoto, Japan, pp. 1133-1137.

  • Webber, Bonnie L.: 1979, A Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora, Garland Publishing, London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Sandra, Mark Harvey and Keith Preston: 1996, ‘Rule-Based Reference Resolution for Unrestricted Text Using Part-of-Speech Tagging and Noun Phrase Parsing’ Approaches to Discourse Anaphora: Proceedings of the Discourse Anaphora and Anaphora Resolution Colloquium (DAARC96), Lancaster, England, pp. 441-456.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities, Languages and Social Studies, University of Wolverhampton, Stafford Street, Wolverhampton, WV1 1SB, England. E-mail

    Ruslan Mitkov

Authors
  1. Ruslan Mitkov
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Mitkov, R. Multilingual Anaphora Resolution. Machine Translation 14, 281–299 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011184828072

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011184828072

Search

Navigation