Zero Anaphors in Chinese Discourse Processing 
Chin-Chuan Cheng 
City University of Hong Kong 
ctcheng@cityu.edu.hk 
Abstract 
In Chinese, zero anaphors occur frequently. This talk discusses 
several issues in identification of zero anaphors. Syntactic tagging of 
words in a running text for detection of anaphora requires specification 
of argument structure for verbal elements. Verbs requiring a subject or 
an object can be used to locate the position of zero anaphors. Typical 
argument structures for verbs, however, often do not take into account 
the expansion of the structure in discourse such as placing the instru- 
ment in object position. Once the place of a zero anaphor is located, 
the discourse processor will attempt to recover the entity. There may 
be more than one entity in the previous context that can fit in the 
argument structure of the verb. It has been discussed in the literature 
that the recovery of zero anaphors requires extra-linguistic knowledge. 
However, I will discuss two recovery principles that utilize linguistic 
information as given in the text. The opening statement of a topic 
continuity normally provides the element for ellipsis in the statements 
that follow. So the first principle is to return to the opening statement 
for recovery. Perceptive verbs, on the other hand, often trigger the 
search of anaphors in the most recent element. This recency principle 
can be broken by certain adverbial expressions that mark the turn of 
the event. These principles apply within a topic continuity. The size 
of a topic continuity is empirically determined to be about 50 words 
with some variation. 
