Resolving "This-issue" Anaphora

We annotate and resolve a particular case of abstract anaphora, namely, this-issue anaphora. We propose a candidate ranking model for this-issue anaphora resolution that explores different issue-specific and general abstract-anaphora features. The model is not restricted to nominal or verbal antecedents; rather, it is able to identify antecedents that are arbitrary spans of text. Our results show that (a) the model outperforms the strong adjacent-sentence baseline; (b) general abstract-anaphora features, as distinguished from issue-specific features, play a crucial role in this-issue anaphora resolution, suggesting that our approach can be generalized for other NPs such as this problem and this debate; and (c) it is possible to reduce the search space in order to improve performance.

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