Abstract

Frannie will present the following paper:

Distributional Identification of Non-Referential Pronouns. Shane Bergsma, Dekang Lin and Randy Goebel. In ACL -HLT 2008, Columbus, Ohio, June 2008.

http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~bergsma/Pubs/bergsmaLinGoebel_NonRefProns_ACL08.pdf

We present an automatic approach to determining whether a pronoun in text refers to a preceding noun phrase or is instead nonreferential. We extract the surrounding textual context of the pronoun and gather, from a large corpus, the distribution of words that occur within that context. We learn to reliably classify these distributions as representing either referential or non-referential pronoun instances. Despite its simplicity, experimental results on classifying the English pronoun It show the system achieves the highest performance yet attained on this important task.