Zero Pronoun Resolution based on Automatically Constructed Case Frames and Structural Preference of Antecedents

Abstract

This paper describes a method to detect and resolve zero pronouns in Japanese text. We detect zero pronouns by case analysis based on automatically constructed case frames, and rank candidate antecedents of a zero pronoun based on similarity to examples in the case frames. We also introduce an order of antecedent location preference to precisely capture the tendency that a zero pronoun has its antecedent in its close position. Large experimental results on 100 articles indicate that the precision and recall of zero pronoun detection are 87.1% and 74.8% respectively and the accuracy of antecedent estimation is 61.8%.