Resolving anaphoric references on deficient syntactic descriptions

Syntactic coindexing restrictions are by now known to be of central importance to practical anaphor resolution approaches. Since, in particular due to structural ambiguity, the assumption of the availability of a unique syntactic reading proves to be unrealistic, robust anaphor resolution relies on techniques to overcome this deficiency. In this paper, two approaches are presented which generalize the verification of coindexing constraints to deficient descriptions. At first, a partly heuristic method is described, which has been implemented. Secondly, a provable complete method is specified. It provides the means to exploit the results of anaphor resolution for a further structural disambiguation. By rendering possible a parallel processing model, this method exhibits, in a general sense, a higher degree of robustness. As a practically optimal solution, a combination of the two approaches is suggested.