Zero Anaphora Resolution in Chinese with Shallow Parsing

Most traditional approaches to anaphora resolution are based on the integration of complex linguistic information and domain knowledge. However, the construction of a domain knowledge base is very labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we work on the output of a part-of-speech tagger and use shallow parsing instead of complex parsing to resolve zero anaphors in written Chinese. We employ centering theory and constraint rules to identify the antecedents of zero anaphors as they appear in the preceding utterances. We focus on the cases of zero anaphors that occur in the topic or subject, and object positions of utterances. The experimental result shows that the precision rates of zero anaphora detection and the recall rate of zero anaphora resolution with the method are 81% and 70% respectively.

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