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Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution: A Chain-to-chain Approach

Published: 05 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Chinese zero pronoun (ZP) resolution plays a critical role in discourse analysis. Different from traditional mention-to-mention approaches, this article proposes a chain-to-chain approach to improve the performance of ZP resolution in three aspects. First, consecutive ZPs are clustered into coreferential chains, each working as one independent anaphor as a whole. In this way, those ZPs far away from their overt antecedents can be bridged via other consecutive ZPs in the same coreferential chains and thus better resolved. Second, common noun phrases (NPs) are automatically grouped into coreferential chains using traditional approaches, each working as one independent antecedent candidate as a whole. That is, those NPs occurring in the same coreferential chain are viewed as one antecedent candidate as a whole, and ZP resolution is made between ZP coreferential chains and common NP coreferential chains. In this way, the performance can be much improved due to the effective reduction of the search space by pruning singletons and negative instances. Third and finally, additional features from ZP and common NP coreferential chains are employed to better represent anaphors and their antecedent candidates, respectively. Comprehensive experiments on the OntoNotes V5.0 corpus show that our chain-to-chain approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art mention-to-mention approaches. To our knowledge, this is the first work to resolve zero pronouns in a chain-to-chain way.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Cognitive and sociolectal constraints on the theme-recipient alternation: evidence from MandarinCorpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory10.1515/cllt-2023-0127Online publication date: 5-Jul-2024
  • (2020)CLASSIFICATION OF SHORT POSSESSIVE CLITIC PRONOUN NYA IN MALAY TEXT TO SUPPORT ANAPHOR CANDIDATE DETERMINATIONJournal of Information and Communication Technology10.32890/jict2020.19.4.319:Number 4(513-532)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2020
  • (2020)A deep neural network model for speakers coreference resolution in legal textsInformation Processing & Management10.1016/j.ipm.2020.10236557:6(102365)Online publication date: Nov-2020

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing
    ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing  Volume 19, Issue 1
    January 2020
    345 pages
    ISSN:2375-4699
    EISSN:2375-4702
    DOI:10.1145/3338846
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 05 June 2019
    Accepted: 01 March 2019
    Revised: 01 October 2018
    Received: 01 December 2017
    Published in TALLIP Volume 19, Issue 1

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    Author Tags

    1. Chinese zero pronoun resolution
    2. chain-level features
    3. chain-to-chain approach
    4. zero pronoun coreferential chains

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    • National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of China
    • Artificial Intelligence Emergency Project
    • National Natural Science Foundation of China

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Cognitive and sociolectal constraints on the theme-recipient alternation: evidence from MandarinCorpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory10.1515/cllt-2023-0127Online publication date: 5-Jul-2024
    • (2020)CLASSIFICATION OF SHORT POSSESSIVE CLITIC PRONOUN NYA IN MALAY TEXT TO SUPPORT ANAPHOR CANDIDATE DETERMINATIONJournal of Information and Communication Technology10.32890/jict2020.19.4.319:Number 4(513-532)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2020
    • (2020)A deep neural network model for speakers coreference resolution in legal textsInformation Processing & Management10.1016/j.ipm.2020.10236557:6(102365)Online publication date: Nov-2020

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