Does Discourse-new Detection Help Definite Description Resolution?

Recent results by Ng and Cardie (2002a) challenge the idea–advanced, e.g., by Vieira and Poesio (2000)–that including methods for identifying discourse new descriptions in an anaphoric resolver leads to better results. In previous work we analyzed the literature on discourse-new detection that followed Vieira and Poesio’s original work, and identified a set of features that appear to be present in all this work. In this paper, we discuss the results obtained by augmenting an existing anaphora resolution system with a statistical discourse-new detector using these features. Our dn classifier achieves F= 90.6 on the discourse new classification task; incorporating this classifier into our existing system results in a significant improvement (from F=79.6 to F=82.4 on hand-annotated text).