Reference Resolution Beyond Coreference: a Conceptual Frame and its Application

A model for reference use in communication is proposed, from a representationist point of view. Both the sender and the receiver of a message handle representations of their common environment, including mental representations of objects. Reference resolution by a computer is viewed as the construction of object representations using referring expressions from the discourse, whereas often only coreference links between such expressions are looked for. Differences between these two approaches are discussed. The model has been implemented with elementary rules, and tested on complex narrative texts (hundreds to thousands of referring expressions). The results support the mental representations paradigm.

Cooperation between Pronoun and Reference Resolution for Unrestricted Texts

Anaphora resolution is envisaged in this paper as part of the reference resolution process. A general open architecture is proposed, which can be particularized and configured in order to simulate some classic anaphora resolution methods. With the aim of improving pronoun resolution, the system takes advantage of elementary cues about characters of the text, which are represented through a particular data structure. In its most robust configuration, the system uses only a general lexicon, a local morpho-syntactic parser and a dictionary of synonyms. A short comparative corpus analysis shows that narrative texts are the most suitable for testing such a system.

Three New Methods for Evaluating Reference Resolution

Reference resolution on extended texts (several thousand references) cannot be evaluated manually. An evaluation algorithm has been proposed for the MUC tests, using equivalence classes for the coreference relation. However, we show here that this algorithm is too indulgent, yielding good scores even for poor resolution strategies. We elaborate on the same formalism to propose two new evaluation algorithms, comparing them first with the MUC algorithm and giving then results on a variety of examples. A third algorithm using only distributional comparison of equivalence classes is finally described; it assesses the relative importance of the recall vs. precision errors.

Evaluation of Coreference Rules on Complex Narrative Texts

This article studies the problem of assessing relevance to each of the rules of a reference resolution system. The reference solver described here stems from a formal model of reference and is integrated in a reference processing workbench. Evaluation of the reference resolution is essential, as it enables differential evaluation of individual rules. Numerical values of these measures are given, and discussed, for simple selection rules and other processing rules; such measures are then studied for numerical parameters.