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An Empirical Evaluation of Pronoun Resolution and Clausal Structure

This paper presents an automated empirical evaluation of the relationship between clausal structure and pronominal reference. Past work has theorized that incorporating discourse structure can constrain the search space in the resolution of pronouns since discourse segments, and thus potential antecedents, can be made inaccessible as the discourse progresses and the focus changes. However, very little empirical work has been done to evaluate these claims. In this study, we develop an automated system and use a corpus annotated for RST and coreference to test whether basic formulations of these claims hold. In particular, we develop and evaluate two pronoun resolution algorithms that incorporate clausal and discourse structure. The first is based on Grosz and Sidner’s theory of discourse structure and the second is based on Cristea et al.’s Veins Theory. Our results show that incorporating basic clausal structure does not improve performance.