Lexical and Grammatical Role Constraints in Resolving Other-Anaphora

Computational research on reference resolution has mostly focused on pronouns and, to a lesser extent, on definite descriptions. We present a computational treatment of other-anaphora, i.e., noun phrases modified by “other” and “another”. The approach presented here is a lexical method LEX that finds antecedents on the basis of information in WordNet. LEX is compared with the state-of-the-art pronoun resolution method based on Centering Theory. A performance comparison between the two algorithms indicates that LEX is superior to the Centering method (48% vs. 37% success rate). Furthermore, an analysis of examples that the Centering method resolved correctly and LEX did not suggests the following: to improve the performance of LEX requires a better treatment of metonymy, bridging, implicit antecedents and non-NP antecedents. Grammatical role, however, does not seem to play a significant part in resolving other-anaphora, other than with pronominal an-