Associative Anaphora Resolution: A Web-Based Approach

We present a novel approach to solving definite descriptions in unrestricted text based on searching the web for a particular type of lexico-syntactic patterns. Using statistics on these patterns, we intend to recover the antecedents for a predefined subset of definite descriptions occurring in two types of anaphoric relations: identity anaphora and associative anaphora. Preliminary results obtained with this method are promising and compare well with other methods.