An Algorithm for Pronominal Anaphora Resolution

Summary

The paper presents RAP (Resolution of Anaphora Procedure), a classic rule-based algorithm for resolving third-person pronouns (including reflexives and reciprocals) using syntactic information from a parser. Candidate antecedents are assigned a salience score built from weighted factors such as recency, grammatical role (subject, existential, direct object, indirect object/oblique), head-noun status and not being inside an adverbial phrase. Salience is halved for each sentence boundary crossed, and role parallelism and cataphora adjust the score. Syntactic filters (agreement and binding-style constraints on co-arguments) remove impossible candidates before the highest-scoring one is chosen. The authors evaluate RAP on technical manuals and compare it with Hobbs' syntactic search algorithm, reporting that the salience approach performs at least as well. The work became a standard reference point for knowledge-poor, transparent pronoun resolution.

How Mova uses it

• the development notes of coref ("What next") — the salience weights of this paper (recency 100, subject 80, existential 70, object 50, indirect object and oblique 40, head noun 80, non-adverbial 50; halving per sentence; parallelism +35, cataphora −175) are recorded as a candidate replacement or complement for the Hobbs-style candidate order used in the pronoun sieve.
• Not implemented yet; the current resolver orders candidates in a Hobbs-like breadth-first tree traversal.

Effectiveness in Mova

Not tried yet (the coref README marks it explicitly as "not tried"). Planned idea only; not measured.

👨‍🔬💥

Topics: Coreference resolution

Cite

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

@misc{lappin1994algorithm,
  title = {{An Algorithm for Pronominal Anaphora Resolution}},
  author = {Lappin, Shalom and Leass, Herbert J.},
  year = {1994},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J94-4002/}
}

References

31 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Alshawi, Hiyan (1987). Memory and Context for Language Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
2. Asher, Nicholas, and Wada, Hajime (1988). "A computational account of syntactic, semantic and discourse principles for anaphora resolution." Journal of Semantics 6:309-344. find
3. Bosch, Peter (1988). "Some good reasons for shallow pronoun processing." In Proceedings, IBM Conference on Natural Language Processing. New York: Thornwood. find
4. Brennan, Susan; Friedman, Marilyn; and Pollard, Carl (1987). "A centering approach to pronouns." In Proceedings, 25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 155-162. find
5. Carbonell, Jaime, and Brown, Ralf (1988). "Anaphora resolution: A multi-strategy approach." In Proceedings, 12th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 96-101. find
6. Dagan, Ido (1992). "Multilingual statistical approaches for natural language disambiguation" (in Hebrew). Doctoral dissertation, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. Dagan, Ido; Justeson, John; Lappin, Shalom; Leass, Herbert; and Ribak, Amnon (in 27 Bosch (1988) suggests a psychological processing model in which hearers rely on first pass syntactically based strategies for initial linking of pronouns to antecedent NPs. press). "Syntax and lexical statistics in anaphora resolution." Applied Artificial Intelligence. find
7. Grosz, Barbara; Joshi, Aravind; and Weinstein, Scott (1983). "Providing a unified account of definite noun phrases in discourse." In Proceedings, 21st Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, 44-50. find
8. Grosz, Barbara; Joshi, Aravind; and Weinstein, Scott (1986, unpublished). "Towards a computational theory of discourse interpretation." Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania. find
9. Grosz, Barbara, and Sidner, Candice (1986). "Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse." Computational Linguistics 12:175-204. find
10. Guenthner, Franz, and Lehmann, Hubert (1983). "Rules for pronominalization." In Proceedings, First Annual Meeting of the European Chapter of the ACL, 144-151. find
11. Hobbs, Jerry (1978). "Resolving pronoun references." Lingua 44:311-338. find our card
12. Johnson, David (1977). "On relational constraints on grammars." In Syntax and Semantics 8, edited by P. Cole and J. Sadock, 151-178. New York: Academic Press. find
13. Kamp, Hans (1981). "A theory of truth and semantic representation." In Formal Methods in the Study of Language, edited by J. Groenendijk, T. Janssen, and M. Stokhof. Amsterdam: Mathematisch Centrum Tracts. find
14. Keenan, Edward, and Comrie, Bernard (1977). "Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar." Linguistic Inquiry 8:62-100. find
15. Lappin, Shalom (1985). "Pronominal binding and coreference." Theoretical Linguistics 12:241-263. find
16. Lappin, Shalom, and McCord, Michael (1990a). "A syntactic filter on pronominal anaphora in slot grammar." In Proceedings, 28th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 135-142. find
17. Lappin, Shalom, and McCord, Michael (1990b). "Anaphora resolution in slot grammar." Computational Linguistics 16:197-212. find
18. Leass, Herbert, and Schwall, Ulrike (1991). "An anaphora resolution procedure for machine translation." IWBS Report 172, IBM Germany Scientific Center, Heidelberg, Germany. find
19. McCord, Michael (1989a). "Design of LMT: A prolog-based machine translation system." Computational Linguistics 15:33-52. find our card
20. McCord, Michael (1989b). "A new version of the machine translation system LMT." Literary and Linguistic Computing 4:218-229. find
21. McCord, Michael (1990). "Slot grammar: A system for simpler construction of practical natural language grammars." In Natural Language and Logic: International Scientific Symposium, edited by R. Studer, 118-145. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Berlin: Springer Verlag. find
22. McCord, Michael (1993). "Heuristics for broad-coverage natural language parsing." In Proceedings, ARPA Human Language Technology Workshop, University of Pennsylvania. find
23. McCord, Michael (in press). "The slot grammar system." In Unification in Grammar, edited by Jiirgen Wedekin and Christian Rohrer (also IBM Research Report RC 17313). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. find
24. McCord, Michael; Bernth, Arendse; Lappin, Shalom; and Zadrozny, Wlodek (1992). "Natural language processing within a slot grammar framework." International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools 1:229-277. find
25. Rich, Elaine, and LuperFoy, Susann (1988). "An architecture for anaphora resolution." In Proccedings, ACL Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, 18-24. find
26. Sidner, Candice (1981). "Focusing for interpretation of pronouns." American Journal of Computational Linguistics 7:217-231. find
27. Sidner, Candice (1983). "Focusing in the comprehension of definite anaphora." In Computational Models of Discourse, edited by Michael Brady and Robert Berwick, 267-330. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. find
28. Walker, Marilyn (1989). "Evaluating discourse processing algorithms." In Proceedings, 27th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 251-261. find
29. Walker, Marilyn; Iida, Masayo; and Cote, Sharon (1990). "Centering in Japanese discourse." In Proceedings, 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, 1-6. find
30. Webber, Bonnie (1988). "Discourse Deixis: Reference to discourse segments." In Proceedings, 26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 113-121. find
31. Williams, Edwin (1984). "Grammatical relations." Linguistic Inquiry 15:639~73. find

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lappin-1994-algorithm-pronominal-anaphora-resolution/