Processing definite descriptions in corpora
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
An algorithm which resolves anaphoric definite descriptions and also identifies novel ones is proposed and evaluated by comparing its results with an annotation produced by human subjects.
Abstract
We discuss in this paper a system that resolves definite descriptions in written texts. A preliminary study of definite descriptions in a collection of 20 texts revealed that about 30% of the 1040 definites in the collection were cases of anaphoric definites whose antecedents had the same head noun, and 50% introduced novel discourse referents. An algorithm which resolves anaphoric definite descriptions and also identifies novel ones is proposed. We evaluated the algorithm by comparing its results with an annotation produced by human subjects. The analysis of the corpus, the implemented algorithm, and the evaluation of the results are presented in this paper.