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Towards Better Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution from Discourse Perspective

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Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10619))

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Abstract

Chinese zero pronoun (ZP) resolution plays an important role in natural language understanding. This paper focuses on improving Chinese ZP resolution from discourse perspective. In particular, various kinds of discourse information are employed in both stages of ZP resolution. During the ZP detection stage, we first propose an elementary discourse unit (EDU) based method to generate ZP candidates from discourse perspective and then exploit relevant discourse context to help better identify ZPs. During the ZP resolution stage, we employ a tree-style discourse rhetorical structure to improve the resolution. Evaluation on OntoNotes shows the significant importance of discourse information to the performance of ZP resolution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to improve Chinese ZP resolution from discourse perspective.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Among them, 325 articles overlap with the “NW” section of the OntoNotes corpus. The following oracle experiments are conducted in this part.

  2. 2.

    If the CA and the ZP are in the same sentence, the value is 0; if they are one sentence apart, the value is 1; and so on.

  3. 3.

    http://maxent.sourceforge.net/.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by Project 61472264, 61673290 and 61502149 under the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Key Project 61333018 under the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

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Correspondence to Kong Fang .

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Cheng, S., Fang, K., Guodong, Z. (2018). Towards Better Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution from Discourse Perspective. In: Huang, X., Jiang, J., Zhao, D., Feng, Y., Hong, Y. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing. NLPCC 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10619. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73618-1_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73618-1_34

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