Resolving bridging references in unrestricted text

Abstract

Our goal is to develop a system capable of treating the largest possible subset of definite descriptions in unrestricted written texts. A previous prototype resolved anaphoric uses of definite descriptions and identified some types of first-mention uses, achieving a recall of 56%. In this paper we present the latest version of our system, which handles some types of bridging references, uses WordNet as a source of lexical knowledge, and achieves a recall of 65%.

A Rule-Based System for Unrestricted Bridging Resolution: Recognizing Bridging Anaphora and Finding Links to Antecedents

“…It is notable that bridging anaphors in ISNotes are not limited to definite NPs as in previous work (Poesio et al, 1997;Poesio et al, 2004;Lassalle and Denis, 2011). Table 1 The semantic relations between anaphor and antecedent in the corpus are extremely diverse: only 14% of anaphors have a part-of/attributeof relation with the antecedent (see Example 2) and only 7% of anaphors stand in a set relationship to the antecedent (see Example 3).…”

“…Instead of using a static sentence window to construct the list of antecedent candidates like most previous work for resolving bridging anaphora (Poesio et al, 1997;Poesio et al, 2004;Lassalle and Denis, 2011), we use the development set to estimate the proper scope for each rule. The scope is influenced by the following factors: (1) the nature of the target bridging link (e.g., set bridging is a local coherence phenomenon where the antecedent often occurs in the same or up to two sentences prior to the anaphor); and (2) the strength of the rule's constraint to select the correct antecedent (e.g., in Rule8, the ability to select the correct antecedent decreases with increasing the scope to contain more antecedent candidates).…”

“…In recent empirical work, these two subtasks have been tackled separately: (Markert et al, 2012;Cahill and Riester, 2012;Rahman and Ng, 2012;Hou et al, 2013a) handle bridging recognition as part of information status (IS) classification, while (Poesio et al, 1997;Poesio et al, 2004;Lassalle and Denis, 2011;Hou et al, 2013b) concentrate on antecedent selection only, assuming that bridging recognition has already been performed. One exception is Vieira and Poesio (2000).…”

Analysis and Reference Resolution of Bridge Anaphora across Different Text Genres

“…Bridging anaphora have been extensively investigated by Poesio et al [17,16,25,15,10]. Both the typology of bridging references and di↵erent information sources to improve automatic resolution were studied.…”

A relational framework for interpreting anaphora

“…NP anaphora resolution studies (e.g. [1], [2], [3]) treat these indirect relations as a single category and refer to them as associative or bridging anaphora, however they are still interpreted as a form co-reference. In this study we propose a relational framework that distinguishes between the different types of semantic relations that can exist between two nouns, one of which is used anaphorically in a discourse.…”