Robust pronoun resolution with limited knowledge 
Ruslan Mitkov 
School of Languages and European Studies 
University of Wolverhampton 
Stafford Street 
Wolverhampton WV 1 1SB 
United Kingdom 
R. Mitkov@wlv. ac. uk 
Abstract 
Most traditional approaches to anaphora resolution 
rely heavily on linguistic and domain knowledge. 
One of the disadvantages of developing a knowledge- 
based system, however, is that it is a very labour- 
intensive and time-consuming task. This paper pres- 
ents a robust, knowledge-poor approach to resolving 
pronouns in technical manuals, which operates on 
texts pre-processed by a part-of-speech tagger. Input 
is checked against agreement and for a number of 
antecedent indicators. Candidates are assigned scores 
by each indicator and the candidate with the highest 
score is returned as the antecedent. Evaluation reports 
a success rate of 89.7% which is better than the suc- 
cess rates of the approaches selected for comparison 
and tested on the same data. In addition, preliminary 
experiments show that the approach can be success- 
fully adapted for other languages with minimum 
modifications. 
1. Introduction 
For the most part, anaphora resolution has focused 
on traditional linguistic methods (Carbonell & 
Brown 1988; Carter 1987; Hobbs 1978; Ingria & 
Stallard 1989; Lappin & McCord 1990; Lappin & 
Leass 1994; Mitkov 1994; Rich & LuperFoy 1988; 
Sidner 1979; Webber 1979). However, to represent 
and manipulate the various types of linguistic and 
domain knowledge involved requires considerable 
human input and computational expense. 
While various alternatives have been proposed, 
making use of e.g. neural networks, a situation se- 
mantics framework, or the principles of reasoning 
with uncertainty (e.g. Connoly et al. 1994; Mitkov 
1995; Tin & Akman 1995), there is still a strong 
need for the development of robust and effective 
strategies to meet the demands of practical NLP 
systems, and to enhance further the automatic pro- 
cessing of growing language resources. 
Several proposals have already addressed the 
anaphora resolution problem by deliberately limiting 
the extent to which they rely on domain and/or lin- 
guistic knowledge (Baldwin 1997; Dagan & Itai 
1990; Kennedy & Boguraev 1996; Mitkov 1998; 
Nasukawa 1994; Williams et al. 1996). Our work is 
a continuation of these latest trends in the search for 
inexpensive, fast and reliable procedures for anaph- 
ora resolution. It is also an example of how anaphors 
in a specific genre can be resolved quite successfully 
without any sophisticated linguistic knowledge or 
even without parsing. Finally, our evaluation shows 
that the basic set of antecedent tracking indicators 
can work well not only for English, but also for 
other languages (in our case Polish and Arabic). 
2. The approach 
With a view to avoiding complex syntactic, seman- 
tic and discourse analysis (which is vital for real- 
world applications), we developed a robust, knowl- 
edge-poor approach to pronoun resolution which 
does not parse and analyse the input in order to 
identify antecedents of anaphors. It makes use of 
only a part-of-speech tagger, plus simple noun 
phrase rules (sentence constituents are identified at 
the level of noun phrase at most) and operates on the 
basis of antecedent-tracking preferences (referred to 
hereafter as "antecedent indicators"). The approach 
works as follows: it takes as an input the output of a 
text processed by a part-of-speech tagger, identifies 
the noun phrases which precede the anaphor within a 
distance of 2 sentences, checks them for gender and 
number agreement with the anaphor and then applies 
the genre-specific antecedent indicators to the re- 
maining candidates (see next section). The noun 
phrase with the highest aggregate score is proposed 
as antecedent; in the rare event of a tie, priority is 
given to the candidate with the higher score for im- 
mediate reference. If immediate reference has not 
been identified, then priority is given to the candi- 
869 
date with the best collocation pattern score. If this 
does not help, the candidate with the higher score 
for indicating verbs is preferred. If still no choice is 
possible, the most recent from the remaining candi- 
dates is selected as the antecedent. 
2.1 Antecedent indicators 
Antecedent indicators (preferences) play a decisive 
role in tracking down the antecedent from a set of 
possible candidates. Candidates are assigned a score 
(-1, 0, 1 or 2) for each indicator; the candidate with 
the highest aggregate score is proposed as the ante- 
cedent. The antecedent indicators have been identi- 
fied empirically and are related to salience 
(definiteness, givenness, indicating verbs, lexical 
reiteration, section heading preference, "non- 
prepositional" noun phrases), to structural matches 
(collocation, immediate reference), to referential 
distance or to preference of terms. Whilst some of 
the indicators are more genre-specific (term prefer- 
ence) and others are less genre-specific ("immediate 
reference"), the majority appear to be genre- 
independent. In the following we shall outline some 
the indicators used and shall illustrate them by ex- 
amples. 
Indicating verbs 
If a verb is a member of the Verb_set = {discuss, 
present, illustrate, identify, summarise, examine, 
describe, define, show, check, develop, review, re- 
port, outline, consider, investigate, explore, assess, 
analyse, synthesise, study, survey, deal, cover}, we 
consider the first NP following it as the preferred an- 
tecedent (scores 1 and 0). Empirical evidence sug- 
gests that because of the salience of the noun 
phrases which follow them, the verbs listed above 
are particularly good indicators. 
Lexical reiteration 
Lexically reiterated items are likely candidates for 
antecedent (a NP scores 2 if is repeated within the 
same paragraph twice or more, 1 if repeated once 
and 0 if not). Lexically reiterated items include re- 
peated synonymous noun phrases which may often 
be preceded by definite articles or demonstratives. 
Also, a sequence of noun phrases with the same 
head counts as lexical reiteration (e.g. "toner bottle", 
"bottle of toner", "the bottle"). 
Section heading preference 
Definiteness 
Definite noun phrases in previous sentences are 
more likely antecedents of pronominal anaphors 
than indefinite ones (definite noun phrases score 0 
and indefinite ones are penalised by -1). We regard a 
noun phrase as definite if the head noun is modified 
by a definite article, or by demonstrative or posses- 
sive pronouns. This rule is ignored if there are no 
definite articles, possessive or demonstrative pro- 
nouns in the paragraph (this exception is taken into 
account because some English user's guides tend to 
omit articles). 
Givenness 
Noun phrases in previous sentences representing the 
"given information" (theme) 1 are deemed good 
candidates for antecedents and score 1 (candidates 
not representing the theme score 0). In a coherent 
text (Firbas 1992), the given or known information, 
or theme, usually appears first, and thus forms a co- 
referential link with the preceding text. The new 
information, or rheme, provides some information 
about the theme. 
lWe use the simple heuristics that the given information 
is the first noun phrase in a non-imperative sentence. 
870 
If a noun phrase occurs in the heading of the section, 
part of which is the current sentence, then we con- 
sider it as the preferred candidate (1, 0). 
"Non-prepositional" noun phrases 
A "pure", "non-prepositional" noun phrase is given a 
higher preference than a noun phrase which is part 
of a prepositional phrase (0, -1). Example: 
Insert the cassette i into the VCR making sure it i is 
suitable for the length of recording. 
Here "the VCR" is penalised (-1) for being part of 
the prepositional phrase "into the VCR". 
This preference can be explained in terms of sali- 
ence from the point of view of the centering theory. 
The latter proposes the ranking "subject, direct ob- 
ject, indirect object" (Brennan et al. 1987) and noun 
phrases which are parts of prepositional phrases are 
usually indirect objects. 
Collocation pattern preference 
This preference is given to candidates which have an 
identical collocation pattern with a pronoun (2,0). 
The collocation preference here is restricted to the 
patterns "noun phrase (pronoun), verb" and "verb, 
noun phrase (pronoun)". Owing to lack of syntactic 
information, this preference is somewhat weaker 
than the collocation preference described in (Dagan 
& Itai 1990). Example: 
Press the key i down and turn the volume up... Press 
it i again. 
Immediate reference 
In technical manuals the "immediate reference" clue 
can often be useful in identifying the antecedent. 
The heuristics used is that in constructions of the 
form "...(You) V l NP ... con (you) V 2 it (con (you) 
V 3 it)", where con ~ {and/or/before/after...}, the 
noun phrase immediately after V l is a very likely 
candidate for antecedent of the pronoun "it" imme- 
diately following V 2 and is therefore given prefer- 
ence (scores 2 and 0). 
This preference can be viewed as a modification 
of the collocation preference. It is also quite fre- 
quent with imperative constructions. Example: 
To print the paper, you can stand the printer i up or 
lay it i flat. 
To turn on the printer, press the Power button i and 
hold it i down for a moment. 
Unwrap the paper i, form it i and align it i, then load it i 
into the drawer. 
Referential distance 
In complex sentences, noun phrases in the previous 
clause 2 are the best candidate for the antecedent of 
an anaphor in the subsequent clause, followed by 
noun phrases in the previous sentence, then by nouns 
situated 2 sentences further back and finally nouns 3 
sentences further back (2, 1, 0, -1). For anaphors in 
simple sentences, noun phrases in the previous sen- 
tence are the best candidate for antecedent, followed 
by noun phrases situated 2 sentences further back 
and finally nouns 3 sentences further back (1, 0, -1). 
Term preference 
NPs representing terms in the field are more likely 
to be the antecedent than NPs which are not terms 
(score 1 if the NP is a term and 0 if not). 
2Identification of clauses in complex sentences is done 
heuristically. 
871 
As already mentioned, each of the antecedent in- 
dicators assigns a score with a value {-1, 0, 1, 2}. 
These scores have been determined experimentally 
on an empirical basis and are constantly being up- 
dated. Top symptoms like "lexical reiteration" as- 
sign score "2" whereas "non-prepositional" noun 
phrases are given a negative score of "-1". We 
should point out that the antecedent indicators are 
preferences and not absolute factors. There might be 
cases where one or more of the antecedent indicators 
do not "point" to the correct antecedent. For in- 
stance, in the sentence "Insert the cassette into the 
VCR i making sure it i is turned on", the indicator 
"non-prepositional noun phrases" would penalise the 
correct antecedent. When all preferences (antecedent 
indicators) are taken into account, however, the right 
antecedent is still very likely to be tracked down - in 
the above example, the "non-prepositional noun 
phrases" heuristics (penalty) would be overturned by 
the "collocational preference" heuristics. 
2.2 Informal description of the algorithm 
The algorithm for pronoun resolution can be de- 
scribed informally as follows: 
1. Examine the current sentence and the two pre- 
ceding sentences (if available). Look for noun 
phrases 3 only to the left of the anaphor 4 
2. Select from the noun phrases identified only 
those which agree in gender and number 5 with 
the pronominal anaphor and group them as a set 
of potential candidates 
3. Apply the antecedent indicators to each poten- 
tial candidate and assign scores; the candidate 
with the highest aggregate score is proposed as 
3A sentence splitter would already have segmented the 
text into sentences, a POS tagger would already have 
determined the parts of speech and a simple phrasal 
grammar would already have detected the noun phrases 
4In this project we do not treat cataphora; non-anaphoric 
"it" occurring in constructions such as "It is important", 
"It is necessary" is eliminated by a "referential filter" 
5Note that this restriction may not always apply in lan- 
guages other than English (e.g. German); on the other 
hand, there are certain collective nouns in English which 
do not agree in number with their antecedents (e.g. 
"government", "team", "parliament" etc. can be referred 
to by "they"; equally some plural nouns (e.g. "data") can 
be referred to by "it") and are exempted from the agree- 
ment test. For this purpose we have drawn up a compre- 
hensive list of all such cases; to our knowledge, no other 
computational treatment of pronominal anaphora resolu- 
tion has addressed the problem of "agreement excep- 
tions". 
antecedent. If two candidates have an equal 
score, the candidate with the higher score for 
immediate reference is proposed as antecedent. 
If immediate reference does not hold, propose 
the candidate with higher score for collocational 
pattern. If collocational pattern suggests a tie or 
does not hold, select the candidate with higher 
score for indicating verbs. If this indicator does 
not hold again, go for the most recent candidate. 
3. Evaluation 
For practical reasons, the approach presented does 
not incorporate syntactic and semantic information 
(other than a list of domain terms) and it is not real- 
istic to expect its performance to be as good as an 
approach which makes use of syntactic and semantic 
knowledge in terms of constraints and preferences. 
The lack of syntactic information, for instance, 
means giving up c-command constraints and subject 
preference (or on other occasions object preference, 
see Mitkov 1995) which could be used in center 
tracking. Syntactic parallelism, useful in discrimi- 
nating between identical pronouns on the basis of 
their syntactic function, also has to be forgone. Lack 
of semantic knowledge rules out the use of verb se- 
mantics and semantic parallelism. Our evaluation, 
however, suggests that much less is lost than might 
be feared. In fact, our evaluation shows that the re- 
sults are comparable to syntax-based methods 
(Lappin & Leass 1994). We believe that the good 
success rate is due to the fact that a number of ante- 
cedent indicators are taken into account and no fac- 
tor is given absolute preference. In particular, this 
strategy can often override incorrect decisions linked 
with strong centering preference (Mitkov & Belguith 
1998) or syntactic and semantic parallelism prefer- 
ences (see below). 
3.1 Evaluation A 
Our first evaluation exercise (Mitkov & Stys 1997) 
was based on a random sample text from a technical 
manual in English (Minolta 1994). There were 71 
pronouns in the 140 page technical manual; 7 of the 
pronouns were non-anaphoric and 16 exophoric. The 
resolution of anaphors was carried out with a suc- 
cess rate of 95.8%. The approach being robust (an 
attempt is made to resolve each anaphor and a pro- 
posed antecedent is returned), this figure represents 
both "precision" and "recall" if we use the MUC 
terminology. To avoid any terminological confusion, 
we shall therefore use the more neutral term 
"success rate" while discussing the evaluation. 
872 
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the ap- 
proach and to explore if/how far it is superior over 
the baseline models for anaphora resolution, we also 
tested the sample text on (i) a Baseline Model which 
checks agreement in number and gender and, where 
more than one candidate remains, picks as antece- 
dent the most recent subject matching the gender 
and number of the anaphor (ii) a Baseline Model 
which picks as antecedent the most recent noun 
phrase that matches the gender and number of the 
anaphor. 
The success rate of the "Baseline Subject" was 
29.2%, whereas the success rate of "Baseline Most 
Recent NP" was 62.5%. Given that our knowledge- 
poor approach is basically an enhancement of a 
baseline model through a set of antecedent indica- 
tors, we see a dramatic improvement in performance 
(95.8%) when these preferences are called upon. 
Typically, our preference-based model proved 
superior to both baseline models when the antece- 
dent was neither the most recent subject nor the 
most recent noun phrase matching the anaphor in 
gender and number. Example: 
Identify the drawer i by the lit paper port LED and 
add paper to it i. 
The aggregate score for "the drawer" is 7 
(definiteness 1 + givenness 0 + term preference 1 + 
indicating verbs l + lexical reiteration 0 + section 
heading 0 + collocation 0 + referential distance 2 + 
non-prepositional noun phrase 0 + immediate refer- 
ence 2 = 7), whereas aggregate score for the most 
recent matching noun phrase ("the lit paper port 
LED") is 4 (definiteness 1 + givenness 0 + term 
preference 1 + indicating verbs 0 + lexical reitera- 
tion 0 + section heading 0 + collocation 0 + referen- 
tial distance 2 + non-prepositional noun phrase 0 + 
immediate reference 0 = 4). 
From this example we can also see that our 
knowledge-poor approach successfully tackles cases 
in which the anaphor and the antecedent have not 
only different syntactic functions but also different 
semantic roles. Usually knowledge-based ap- 
proaches have difficulties in such a situation because 
they use preferences such as "syntactic parallelism" 
or "semantic parallelism". Our robust approach does 
not use these because it has no information about the 
syntactic structure of the sentence or about the syn- 
tactic function/semantic role of each individual 
word. 
As far as the typical failure cases are concerned, 
we anticipate the knowledge-poor approach to have 
difficulties with sentences which have a more com- 
plex syntactic structure. This should not be surpris- 
ing, given that the approach does not rely on any 
syntactic knowledge and in particular, it does not 
produce any parse tree. Indeed, the approach fails on 
the sentence: 
The paper through key can be used to feed \[a 
blank sheet of paper\]i through the copier out 
into the copy tray without making a copy on 
iti. 
where "blank sheet of paper" scores only 2 as op- 
posed to the "the paper through key" which scores 6. 
3.2 Evaluation B 
Similarly to the first evaluation, we found that the 
robust approach was not very successful on sen- 
tences with too complicated syntax - a price we have 
to pay for the "convenience" of developing a knowl- 
edge-poor system. 
The results from experiment 1 and experiment 2 
can be summarised in the following (statistically) 
slightly more representative figures. 
Success rate 
(=Precision/ 
Recall) 
Robust 
approach 
89.7% 
Baseline 
subject 
31.55% / 
48.55% 
Baseline 
most recent 
65.95% 
We carried out a second evaluation of the approach 
on a different set of sample texts from the genre of 
technical manuals (47-page Portable Style-Writer 
User's Guide (Stylewriter 1994). Out of 223 pro- 
nouns in the text, 167 were non-anaphoric (deictic 
and non-anaphoric "it"). The evaluation carried out 
was manual to ensure that no added error was gen- 
erated (e.g. due to possible wrong sentence/clause 
detection or POS tagging). Another reason for doing 
it by hand is to ensure a fair comparison with Breck 
Baldwin's method, which not being available to us, 
had to be hand-simulated (see 3.3). 
The evaluation indicated 83.6% success rate. The 
"Baseline subject" model tested on the same data 
scored 33.9% recall and 67.9% precision, whereas 
"Baseline most recent" scored 66.7%. Note that 
"Baseline subject" can be assessed both in terms of 
recall and precision because this "version" is not 
robust: in the event of no subject being available, it 
is not able to propose an antecedent (the manual 
guide used as evaluation text contained many im- 
perative zero-subject sentences). 
In the second experiment we evaluated the ap- 
proach from the point of view also of its "critical 
success rate". This measure (Mitkov 1998b) applies 
only to anaphors "ambiguous" from the point of 
view of number and gender (i.e. to those "tough" 
anaphors which, after activating the gender and 
number filters, still have more than one candidate 
for antecedent) and is indicative of the performance 
of the antecedent indicators. Our evaluation estab- 
lished the critical success rate as 82%. 
A case where the system failed was when the 
anaphor and the antecedent were in the same sen- 
tence and where preference was given to a candidate 
in the preceding sentence. This case and other cases 
suggest that it might be worthwhile reconsider- 
ing/refining the weights for the indicator "referential 
distance". 
The lower figure in "Baseline subject" corresponds 
to "recall" and the higher figure - to "precision". 
If we regard as "discriminative power" of each 
antecedent indicator the ratio "number of successful 
antecedent identifications when this indicator was 
applied"/"number of applications of this indicator" 
(for the non-prepositional noun phrase and definite- 
ness being penalising indicators, this figure is calcu- 
lated as the ratio "number of unsuccessful antece- 
dent identifications"/"number of applications"), the 
immediate reference emerges as the most discrimi- 
native indicator (100%), followed by non- 
prepositional noun phrase (92.2%), collocation 
(90.9%), section heading (61.9%), lexical reiteration 
(58.5%), givenness (49.3%), term preference 
(35.7%) and referential distance (34.4%). The rela- 
tively low figures for the majority of indicators 
should not be regarded as a surprise: firstly, we 
should bear in mind that in most cases a candidate 
was picked (or rejected) as an antecedent on the ba- 
sis of applying a number of different indicators and 
secondly, that most anaphors had a relatively high 
number of candidates for antecedent. 
In terms of frequency of use ("number of non-zero 
applications"/"number of anaphors"), the most fre- 
quently used indicator proved to be referential dis- 
tance used in 98.9% of the cases, followed by term 
preference (97.8%), givenness (83.3%), lexical reit- 
eration (64.4%), definiteness (40%), section heading 
(37.8%), immediate reference (31.1%) and colloca- 
tion (11.1%). As expected, the most frequent indica- 
tors were not the most discriminative ones. 
3.3 Comparison to similar approaches: compara- 
tive evaluation of Breck Baldwin's CogNIAC 
We felt appropriate to extend the evaluation of our 
approach by comparing it to Breck Baldwin's Cog- 
NIAC (Baldwin 1997) approach which features 
"high precision coreference with limited knowledge 
873 
and linguistics resources". The reason is that both 
our approach and Breck Baldwin's approach share 
common principles (both are knowledge-poor and 
use a POS tagger to provide the input) and therefore 
a comparison would be appropriate. 
Given that our approach is robust and returns an- 
tecedent for each pronoun, in order to make the 
comparison as fair as possible, we used CogNIAC's 
"resolve all" version by simulating it manually on 
the same training data used in evaluation B above. 
CogNIAC successfully resolved the pronouns in 
75% of the cases. This result is comparable with the 
results described in (Baldwin 1997). For the training 
data from the genre of technical manuals, it was rule 
5 (see Baldwin 1997) which was most frequently 
used (39% of the cases, 100% success), followed by 
rule 8 (33% of the cases, 33% success), rule 7 (11%, 
100%), rule I (9%, 100%) and rule 3 (7.4%, 100%). 
It would be fair to say that even though the results 
show superiority of our approach on the training 
data used (the genre of technical manuals), they 
cannot be generalised automatically for other genres 
or unrestricted texts and for a more accurate picture, 
further extensive tests are necessary. 
4. Adapting the robust approach for other 
languages 
An attractive feature of any NLP approach would be 
its language "universality". While we acknowledge 
that most of the monolingual NLP approaches are 
not automatically transferable (with the same degree 
of efficiency) to other languages, it would be highly 
desirable if this could be done with minimal adapta- 
tion. 
We used the robust approach as a basis for devel- 
oping a genre-specific reference resolution approach 
in Polish. As expected, some of the preferences had 
to be modified in order to fit with specific features 
of Polish (Mitkov & Stys 1997). For the time being, 
we are using the same scores for Polish. 
The evaluation for Polish was based technical 
manuals available on the Internet (Internet Manual, 
1994; Java Manual 1998). The sample texts con- 
tained 180 pronouns among which were 120 in- 
stances of exophoric reference (most being zero pro- 
nouns). The robust approach adapted for Polish 
demonstrated a high success rate of 93.3% in resolv- 
ing anaphors (with critical success rate of 86.2%). 
Similarly to the evaluation for English, we com- 
pared the approach for Polish with (i) a Baseline 
Model which discounts candidates on the basis of 
agreement in number and gender and, if there were 
still competing candidates, selects as the antecedent 
the most recent subject matching the anaphor in 
874 
gender and number (ii) a Baseline Model which 
checks agreement in number and gender and, if there 
were still more than one candidate left, picks up as 
the antecedent the most recent noun phrase that 
agrees with the anaphor. 
Our preference-based approach showed clear su- 
periority over both baseline models. The first Base- 
line Model (Baseline Subject) was successful in only 
23.7% of the cases, whereas the second (Baseline 
Most Recent) had a success rate of 68.4%. There- 
fore, the 93.3% success rate (see above) demon- 
strates a dramatic increase in precision, which is due 
to the use of antecedent tracking preferences. 
We have recently adapted the approach for Ara- 
bic as well (Mitkov & Belguith 1998). Our evalua- 
tion, based on 63 examples (anaphors) from a tech- 
nical manual (Sony 1992), indicates a success rate of 
95.2% (and critical success rate 89.3 %). 
5. Conclusion 
We have described a robust, knowledge-poor ap- 
proach to pronoun resolution which operates on texts 
pre-processed by a part-of-speech tagger. Evaluation 
shows a success rate of 89.7% for the genre of tech- 
nical manuals and at least in this genre, the approach 
appears to be more successful than other similar 
methods. We have also adapted and evaluated the 
approach for Polish (93.3 % success rate) and for 
Arabic (95.2% success rate). 

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