Employing the Centering Theory in Pronoun Resolution from the Semantic Perspective

In this paper, we employ the centering theory in pronoun resolution from the semantic perspective. First, diverse semantic role features with regard to different predicates in a sentence are explored. Moreover, given a pronominal anaphor, its relative ranking among all the pronouns in a sentence, according to relevant semantic role information and its surface position, is incorporated. In particular, the use of both the semantic role features and the relative pronominal ranking feature in pronoun resolution is guided by extending the centering theory from the grammatical level to the semantic level in tracking the local discourse focus. Finally, detailed pronominal subcategory features are incorporated to enhance the discriminative power of both the semantic role features and the relative pronominal ranking feature. Experimental results on the ACE 2003 corpus show that the centeringmotivated features contribute much to pronoun resolution.