Acquiring Lexical Knowledge for Anaphora Resolution

The lack of adequate bases of commonsense or even lexical knowledge is perhaps the main obstacle to the development of highperformance, robust tools for semantic interpretation. It is also generally accepted that, notwithstanding the increasing availability in recent years of substantial hand-coded lexical resources such as WordNet and EuroWordNet, addressing the commonsense knowledge bottleneck will eventually require the development of effective techniques for acquiring such information automatically, e.g., from corpora. We discuss research aimed at improving the performance of anaphora resolution systems by acquiring the commonsense knowledge require to resolve the more complex cases of anaphora, such as bridging references. We focus in particular on the problem of acquiring information about part-of relations.