Centering in Chinese Anaphor Resolution: A Parametric Study

The basic concepts in Centering Theory, such as utterance, ranking and R1-pronouns, are purposely left unspecified to concrete tasks. The proper setting of these parameters in Chinese anaphoric resolution is examined in this study. Six resolution algorithms are designed to examine the effectiveness of the instantiations of different parametric settings. The results reveal that utterances, when segmented into smaller chunks, are more suitable for zero pronoun resolution (ZP resolution). Pronoun resolution (PRON resolution) shows relatively lower degree of sensitiveness to the change of utterance definitions. The ranking-affecting factors, grammatical functions and syntactic hierarchies, have greater bearing on the resolution. The influence from the parallelism of grammatical functions is testified but marginal in many instantiations. The Cb continuity claimed by Centering demonstrates weak correlation with the antecedent determination. The pervasive higher precision rate in ZP resolution suggests that zero anaphors are more suitable to be chosen as R1-pronouns in Centering model.