Corpora: Anaphora resolution

[Marco Antonio Esteves da Rocha]

Hello, Ruslan, Narjés and all in the list. 

I decided I would first post a message to the list as a whole, but in case the
discussion becomes too specialised so as to be of interest for anaphora
buffs only, DO complain.

It is a bit risky to think of anaphora resolution as input to topic
segmentation because the resolution of complex anaphora cases - mostly
those which cannot be resolved by a plain first-candidate search with
minor adjustments - often relies on topic tracking in order to select
preferred antecedents and bypass candidates which would be chosen on a
strictly recency-and-agreement basis.

I understand Narjés is training an HMM, and thus wants to keep it as
knowledge poor as possible. But he may find further down on the way
towards completion of his research that a number of references cannot be
resolved without the sort of discourse information of which topic tracking
is a part. The circularity problem (pointed out by Fox (1987)) becomes
then a nontrivial difficulty. You need anaphora resolution for topic
segmentation, but you need topic segmentation for anaphora resolution.

I haven't had the chance to test the tools developed by the Wolverhampton
people and I have no idea whether this circularity problem or any
consideration of topic tracking matters are part of the processing for
anaphora resolution using these tools. But I would be careful not to
assume without further thought that resolving anaphora is an input to
topic segmentation, even if an HMM is used, and especially in dialogues.

I hope you don't think I am too picky.

Marco Rocha
     



 On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Ruslan Mitkov wrote:

> May I suggest that you visit 
> http://www.wlv.ac.uk/sles/compling/ 
> and have a look at our 3 anaphora resolution demos.
> We could offer you MARS but you will need 
> the FDG shallow parser for it.
> 
> You will see that members of the Research Group 
> in Computational Linguistics at the University of 
> Wolverhampton have also developed 
> tools for annotating coreference.
> 
> I hope this helps
> Ruslan Mitkov
> 
> 
> -0500, Narjès Boufaden wrote:
> >Hello Everyone,
> >
> >Can anybody point me to a free anaphora resolution module for English? I
> >am training an HMM for topic segmentaion for dialogs it is a part of my
> >PhD thesis. I need this module  to resolve references and give them as
> >input of my system. Any information is appreciate.
> >
> >Thanks,
> >
> >--
> >Narjès Boufaden
> >Étudiante en doctorat,
> >RALI, Université de Montréal
> >
> >http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~boufaden
> >
> >
> 
> 
> \\\ Ruslan Mitkov, PhD 
> /// Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering 
> \\\ School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences
> /// University of Wolverhampton 
> \\\ Stafford St. 
> /// Wolverhampton WV1 1SB 
> \\\ United Kingdom 
> /// Telephone (44-1902) 322471 
> \\\ Fax (44-1902) 322739 
> /// Email R.Mitkov at wlv.ac.uk
> \\\ Website http://www.wlv.ac.uk/~le1825/ 
> 
>