Multilingual Robust Anaphora Resolution

Most traditional approaches to anaphora resolution rely heavily on linguistic and domain knowledge. One of the disadvantages of developing a knowledge-based system, however, is that it is a very labour-intensive and timehconsuming task. This paper presents a robust, knowledge-poor approach to resolving pronouns in technical manuals. This approach is a modification of the practical approach (Mitkov 1998a) and operates on texts pre-processed by a part-of-speech taggcr. Input is checked against agreement and a nlonhber of antecedent indicators. Candidates are assigried scores by each indicator and the candidate with the highest ag~ gregate score is returned as the antecedent. We pro~ pose this approach as a platform for multilingual pronoun resolution. The robust approach was initially de~ veloped and tested for English, but we have also adapted and tested it for Polish and Arabic. For both languages, we found that adaptation required minimum modification and that further, even if used un~ modified, the approach delivers acceptable success rates. Preliminary evaluation reports high success rates in the range of and over 90%

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