A Pronoun Anaphora Resolution System based on Factorial Hidden Markov Models

This paper presents a supervised pronoun anaphora resolution system based on factorial hidden Markov models (FHMMs). The basic idea is that the hidden states of FHMMs are an explicit short-term memory with an antecedent buffer containing recently described referents. Thus an observed pronoun can find its antecedent from the hidden buffer, or in terms of a generative model, the entries in the hidden buffer generate the corresponding pronouns. A system implementing this model is evaluated on the ACE corpus with promising performance.