Statistical Anaphora Resolution

1
Statistical Anaphora Resolution

• Ben Handy, Tyler Hicks-Wright, Eric Schkufza

2
Anaphora Resolution

• Given a body of text, anaphora resolution is the
  problem of associating pronouns with the nouns
  and noun phrases that they refer to.
• Mr. Harris finally arrived in Munich on Saturday
  afternoon after a lengthy delay in Rome. However,
  he did not meet Ms. Lewis until the following
  morning.

3
Ge, Hale, Charniak, 1998

• A Statistical Approach to Anaphora Resolution
• P(A(p) a p, h, W , t, l, sp, d, M)
• Hobbs Distance P(dH i a)
• Gender-Animaticity P(p wa)
• Mention Count P(a ma, j)
• Parse Probability P(wa h, t, l)

4
Handy, Hicks-Wright, Schkufza, 2006

• Ges probability can be interpreted as a score
• Augment that score with
• Language Model score rates substitutions based
  on their grammatical correctness.
• MaxEnt based score augments Ges
  gender-animaticity score.

5
Experimental Results
6
Acknowledgements

• Chris Manning
• Bill MacCartney
• apologies for the incorrect spelling in our paper