Abstract
A definite noun phrase can indirectly refer to an entity that has already been mentioned before. For example, “There is a house.The roof is white.” indicates that “the roof” is associated with “a house”, which was mentioned in a previous sentense. This kind of references (indirect anaphora) has not been studied well in natural language processing, but is important for coherence resolution, language understanding, and machine translation. When we analyze indirect anaphora, we need a case frame dictionary for nouns containing a knowledge about relations between two nouns. But no noun case frame dictionary exists at present. Therefore, we are forced to use examples of “A of B” and a verb case frame dictionary, instead. We experimented the estimation of indirect anaphoras by using this information, and obtained a recall rate of 63% and a precision rate of 68% on held-out test sentences. This indicates that the information of‘A of B’ is useful to a certain extent when we can not make use of a noun case frame dictionary. We made an estimation in the case that we can use a good noun case frame dictionary, and obtained the result with the recall and the precision rates of 71% and 82%, respectively. Finally we proposed how to construct a noun case frame dictionary from examples of “A of B”.
