Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 15 (2001), pp. 263-287. Submitted 3/01; published 10/01.
© 2001 AI Access Foundation and Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. All rights reserved.
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Computational Approach to Anaphora Resolution
in Spanish Dialogues

Manuel Palomar mpalomar@dlsi.ua.es
Dept. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos
Universidad de Alicante
Alicante, SPAIN
Patricio Martínez-Barco patricio@dlsi.ua.es
Dept. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos
Universidad de Alicante
Alicante, SPAIN

Abstract:

This paper presents an algorithm for identifying noun-phrase antecedents of pronouns and adjectival anaphors in Spanish dialogues. We believe that anaphora resolution requires numerous sources of information in order to find the correct antecedent of the anaphor. These sources can be of different kinds, e.g., linguistic information, discourse/dialogue structure information, or topic information. For this reason, our algorithm uses various different kinds of information (hybrid information). The algorithm is based on linguistic constraints and preferences and uses an anaphoric accessibility space within which the algorithm finds the noun phrase. We present some experiments related to this algorithm and this space using a corpus of 204 dialogues. The algorithm is implemented in Prolog. According to this study, 95.9% of antecedents were located in the proposed space, a precision of 81.3% was obtained for pronominal anaphora resolution, and 81.5% for adjectival anaphora.