Referent tracking and pronoun resolution in Finnish

This paper presents a referent-tracking and pronoun resolution system for Finnish, a free-word-order, articleless language that poses a challenge for algorithms designed for languages like English that have definite/indefinite articles. To track referents and interpret pronouns in Finnish, this algorithm uses the pragmatically-motivated word order tendencies of Finnish to create an ordered register of pegs (where each peg is associated with an entity in the discourse), ranked according to salience. Pronouns are interpreted as referring to the topmost peg in the register. The algorithm aims to extend and adapt notions from Dynamic Semantics (Groenendijk et al. 1996) and Centering Theory (Grosz et al. 1995) to a typologically different language.