CogNIAC: A Discourse Processing Engine

Authors: Breck Baldwin · Year: 1995 · Venue: PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania
Link: unknown License of the paper: unknown

Summary

This doctoral thesis describes CogNIAC, a pronoun and coreference resolution engine built around a small set of high-confidence rules applied in order. The philosophy is precision first: a pronoun is resolved only when a rule fires unambiguously, otherwise it is left unresolved, so that downstream applications get few but reliable links. The rules rely on limited knowledge and shallow linguistic resources, such as unique antecedents in the current and previous sentence, reflexives, and patterns in quoted speech. The work was later summarised in a shorter 1997 workshop paper ("CogNIAC: high precision coreference with limited knowledge and linguistic resources"). Further details of the thesis contents are not confirmed here.

How Mova uses it

• coref/src/sieve.rs (find_quote_authors) — determining who speaks in a quotation: in a sentence containing a quote, the author is the subject of a speech verb outside the quotation marks; speech verbs come from a closed hand-written list. A quote continuing into the next sentence without a new author keeps the same author.
• The rule is cited together with Lee et al. 2013 (§3.3.1) and feeds the speaker sieve: first-person pronouns of one voice are one person, "you" addressed to someone links to that person's earlier "I".

Effectiveness in Mova

The quote-author rule is part of the speaker sieve, which in the development notes of coref (GUM test, gold trees, cumulative contribution) makes 771 links at 90.7% precision and adds +21.88 CoNLL F1 without singletons (+21.99 with Mova's own trees). That figure covers the whole sieve (also built on Lee et al. 2013); the contribution of the quote-author rule alone is not measured separately.

👨‍🔬💥

Topics: Discourse analysis · Coreference resolution

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{baldwin1997cogniac,
  title = {{CogNIAC: A Discourse Processing Engine}},
  author = {Baldwin, Breck},
  booktitle = {Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution for Unrestricted Texts},
  year = {1997},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W97-1306/}
}

References

14 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Baldwin, B., "CogNIAC: A discourse processing engine", University of Pennsylvania, Department of Computer and Information Science, Ph.D. dissertation. find
2. Baldwin, B., Reynar, J., Collins, M., Eisner, J., Ratnaparkhi, A., Rosenzweig, J., Sarkar, A., Srinivas (1995), "University of Pennsylvania: Description of the University of Pennsylvania system used for MUC-6", Proceedings of Sixth Message Understanding Conference, November 1995. find
3. Collins, M., "A New Statistical Parser based on Bigram Lexical Dependencies", Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, June, 1996. find
4. Carter, D. (1986), "Common Sense Inference in a Focus-Guided Anaphor Resolver", Journal of Semantics, 4. find
5. Chinchor, N., Sundheim, B. (1994) "Coreference Task Definition vl.l", supporting documentation for MUC-6 coreference task. find
6. Dagan, I., Itai, A., (1990) A Statistical Filter for Resolving Pronoun References, Proceedings of 7th Israeli Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision. find
7. Grosz, B. J, Joshi, A. K., and Weinstein, S. (1986) "Towards a Computational Theory of Discourse Interpretation" Ms. find
8. Hobbs, J. (1976) "Pronoun Resolution", Research Report \#76-1, City College, City University of New York. find
9. Hobbs, J. (1977) "38 Examples of Elusive Antecedents from Published Texts", Research Report \#77-2, City College, City University of New York. find
10. C. Kennedy, B. Boguraev, "Anaphora for everyone: pronominal anaphora resolution without a parser." Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics COLING'96, Copenhagen, Denmark, 5-9 August 1996 find
11. Lappin, S., Leass, H. (1994) "An Algorithm for Pronominal Anaphora Resolution", Computational Linguistics. find our card
12. Mitkov R., "Pronoun resolution: the practical alternative", In S. Botley, T. McEnery (Eds) "Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution". University College London Press, 1997 find
13. Sidner, C. L. (1986) "Focusing in the Comprehension of Definite Anaphora", Readings in Natural Language Processing, eds Grosz, Jones, Webber. Morgan Kaufman, Los Altos CA. find
14. Winograd, T. 1972, "Understanding Natural Language", New York: Academic Press. find

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/baldwin-1995-cogniac-discourse-processing-engine/