Zero anaphora resolution by case-based reasoning and pattern conceptualization

Abstract

Effective anaphora resolution is helpful to many applications of natural language processing such as machine translation, summarization and question answering. In this paper, a novel resolution approach is proposed to tackle zero anaphora, which is the most frequent type of anaphora shown in Chinese texts. Unlike most of the previous approaches relying on hand-coded rules, our resolution is mainly constructed by employing case-based reasoning and pattern conceptualization. Moreover, the resolution is incorporated with the mechanisms to identify cataphora and non-antecedent instances so as to enhance the resolution performance. Compared to a general rule-based approach, the proposed approach indeed improves the resolution performance by achieves 78% recall and 79% precision on solving 1051 zero anaphora instances in 382 narrative texts. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.