Discourse-New Detectors for Definite Description Resolution: A Survey and a Preliminary Proposal

Vieira and Poesio (2000) proposed an algorithm for definite description ( DD) resolution that incorporates a number of heuristics for detecting discoursenew descriptions. The inclusion of such detectors was motivated by the observation that more than 50% of definite descriptions ( DDs) in an average corpus are discourse new (Poesio and Vieira, 1998), but whereas the inclusion of detectors for non-anaphoric pronouns in algorithms such as Lappin and Leass’ (1994) leads to clear improvements in precision, the improvements in anaphoric DD resolution (as opposed to classification) brought about by the detectors were rather small. In fact, Ng and Cardie (2002a) challenged the motivation for the inclusion of such detectors, reporting no improvements, or even worse performance. We re-examine the literature on the topic in detail, and propose a revised algorithm, taking advantage of the improved discourse-new detection techniques developed by Uryupina (2003).