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Focusing for Pronoun Resolution in English Discourse: An Implementation

Ebru Ersan·Varol Akman
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Abstract

Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and devised several algorithms to resolve definite anaphora including pronouns. She presented her theory in a computational framework but did not generally implement the algorithms. Her algorithms related to focusing and pronoun resolution are implemented in this thesis. This implementation provides a better comprehension of the theory both from a conceptual and a computational point of view. The resulting program is tested on different discourse segments, and evaluation and analysis of the experiments are presented together with the statistical results.

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Ebru Ersan, Varol Akman. 1994-09-07. Focusing for Pronoun Resolution in English Discourse: An Implementation. https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9409005

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