Resolving Discourse-Deictic Pronouns: A Two-Stage Approach to Do It
Venue
Proceedings of the 4th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2015), pp. 299-308
Publication Year
2015
Authors
Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Raul D. Guerra, Edgar Gonzàlez Pellicer, Marta Recasens
BibTeX
Abstract
Discourse deixis is a linguistic phenomenon in which pronouns have verbal or
clausal, rather than nominal, antecedents. Studies have estimated that between 5%
and 10% of pronouns in non-conversational data are discourse deictic. However,
current coreference resolution systems ignore this phenomenon. This paper presents
an automatic system for the detection and resolution of discourse-deictic pronouns.
We introduce a two-step approach that first recognizes instances of
discourse-deictic pronouns, and then resolves them to their verbal antecedent. Both
components rely on linguistically motivated features. We evaluate the components in
isolation and in combination with two state-of-the-art coreference resolvers.
Results show that our system outperforms several baselines, including the only
comparable discourse deixis system, and leads to small but statistically
significant improvements over the full coreference resolution systems. An error
analysis lays bare the need for a less strict evaluation of this task.
