Dialogue focus tracking for zero pronoun resolution

We take a novel approach to zero pronoun resolution in Chinese: our model explicitly tracks the flow of focus in a discourse. Our approach, which generalizes to deictic references, is not reliant on the presence of overt noun phrase antecedents to resolve to, and allows us to address the large percentage of “non-anaphoric” pronouns filtered out in other approaches. We furthermore train our model using readily available parallel Chinese/English corpora, allowing for training without hand-annotated data. Our results demonstrate improvements on two test sets, as well as the usefulness of linguistically motivated features.