A Data-driven Approach to Pronominal Anaphora Resolution for German

This paper reports on a hybrid architecture for computational anaphora resolution (CAR) of German that combines a rule-based pre-filtering component with a memory-based resolution module (using the Tilburg Memory Based Learner – TiMBL). The data source is provided by the TüBa-D/Z treebank of German newspaper text (Telljohann et al. 04) that is annotated with anaphoric relations. The CAR experiments performed on these treebank data corroborate the importance of modelling aspects of discourse structure for robust, data-driven anaphora resolution. The best result with an F-measure of 0.734 achieved by these experiments outperforms the results reported by (Schiehlen 04), the only other study of German CAR that is based on newspaper treebank data.