Towards the Automatic Resolution of Anaphora with Non-nominal Antecedents: Insights from Annotation

This paper deals with a particular form of anaphora in which the anaphors refer to non-nominal antecedents. We investigate two existing datasets, annotated with pronominal and nominal anaphors (shell nouns) respectively, and attempt to determine to what degree the different types of anaphors provide useful hints as to the form and location of their antecedents. To this end, we look at the distribution of the antecedents, their syntactic form, and their semantic content. In particular, as the difficulty of annotating the phenomenon constitutes a major hurdle to the development of larger datasets, we take a close look at the agreement between annotators and relate this to the different types of anaphors.