Unsupervised Learning of Contextual Role Knowledge for Coreference Resolution

We present a coreference resolver called BABAR that uses contextual role knowledge to evaluate possible antecedents for an anaphor. BABAR uses information extraction patterns to identify contextual roles and creates four contextual role knowledge sources using unsupervised learning. These knowledge sources determine whether the contexts surrounding an anaphor and antecedent are compatible. BABAR applies a Dempster-Shafer probabilistic model to make resolutions based on evidence from the contextual role knowledge sources as well as general knowledge sources. Experiments in two domains showed that the contextual role knowledge improved coreference performance, especially on pronouns.

[1]  Alon Itai,et al.  Automatic Processing of Large Corpora for the Resolution of Anaphora References , 1990, COLING.

[2]  UniversityCambridge,et al.  Lost Intuitions and Forgotten , 1998 .

[3]  Ted Dunning,et al.  Accurate Methods for the Statistics of Surprise and Coincidence , 1993, CL.

[4]  Scott Weinstein,et al.  Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse , 1995, CL.

[5]  Hwee Tou Ng,et al.  A Machine Learning Approach to Coreference Resolution of Noun Phrases , 2001, CL.

[6]  George A. Miller,et al.  Introduction to WordNet: An On-line Lexical Database , 1990 .

[7]  John Hale,et al.  A Statistical Approach to Anaphora Resolution , 1998, VLC@COLING/ACL.

[8]  Jerry R. Hobbs.  Resolving pronoun references , 1986 .

[9]  Michael Böttner,et al.  Natural Language , 1997, Relational Methods in Computer Science.

[10]  Scott Bennett,et al.  Applying machine learning to anaphora resolution , 1995, Learning for Natural Language Processing.

[11]  Claire Gardent,et al.  Improving Machine Learning Approaches to Coreference Resolution , 2002, ACL.

[12]  Ellen Riloff,et al.  Corpus-Based Identification of Non-Anaphoric Noun Phrases , 1999, ACL.

[13]  Wendy G. Lehnert,et al.  Using Decision Trees for Coreference Resolution , 1995, IJCAI.

[14]  Ellen Riloff,et al.  An Empirical Study of Automated Dictionary Construction for Information Extraction in Three Domains , 1996, Artif. Intell..

[15]  Mark Stefik,et al.  Introduction to knowledge systems , 1995 .

[16]  Andrew Kehler,et al.  Probabilistic Coreference in Information Extraction , 1997, EMNLP.

[17]  Shalom Lappin,et al.  An Algorithm for Pronominal Anaphora Resolution , 1994, CL.

[18]  R. H. Telang,et al.  Some Cases , 1917, The Indian medical gazette.