Computational Approach to Anaphora Resolution in Spanish Dialogues

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid algorithm for resolving anaphora in Spanish dialogues, combining linguistic and discourse information, achieving high accuracy in identifying antecedents within a specialized accessibility space.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hybrid approach utilizing multiple information sources and an anaphoric accessibility space for improved anaphora resolution in Spanish dialogues.

Findings

95.9% of antecedents located in the proposed space

81.3% precision for pronominal anaphora resolution

81.5% precision for adjectival anaphora

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.