CogNIAC: High Precision Coreference With Limited Knowledge And Linguistic Resources

This paper presents a high precision pronoun resolution system that is capable of greater than 90% precision with 60% and better recall for some pronouns. It is suggested that the system is resolving a sub-set of anaphors that do not require general world knowledge or sophisticated linguistic processing for successful resolution. The system does this by being very sensitive to ambiguity, and only resolving pronouns when very high confidence rules have been satisfied. The system is capable of 'noticing' ambiguity because it requires that there be a unique antecedent within a salience ranking, and the salience rankings are not total orders, i.e. two or more antecedents can be equally salient. Given the nature of the systems rules, it is very likely that they are largely domain independent and that they reflect processing strategies used by humans for general language comprehension. The system has been evaluated in two distinct experiments which support the overall validity of the approach.