Finding The Right One and Resolving it

Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 132–141 Online, November 19-20, 2020. c⃝2020 Association for Computational Linguistics https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P17 132 Finding the Right One and Resolving it Payal Khullar Arghya Bhattacharya Manish Shrivastava Language Technologies Research Centre International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad Gachibowli, Hyderabad, Telangana-500032 {payal.khullar@research., arghya.b@research., m.shrivastava@}iiit.ac.in Abstract One-anaphora has figured prominently in theo- retical linguistic literature, but computational linguistics research on the phenomenon is sparse. Not only that, the long standing lin- guistic controversy between the determinative and the nominal anaphoric element one has propagated in the limited body of computa- tional work on one-anaphora resolution, mak- ing this task harder than it is. In the present paper, we resolve this by drawing from an ad- equate linguistic analysis of the word one in different syntactic environments - once again highlighting the significance of linguistic the- ory in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. We prepare an annotated corpus mark- ing actual instances of one-anaphora with their textual antecedents, and use the annotations to experiment with state-of-the art neural models for one-anaphora resolution. Apart from pre- senting a strong neural baseline for this task, we contribute a gold-standard corpus, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the biggest resource on one-anaphora till date. 1 Introduction One-anaphora is an anaphoric relation between a non-lexical proform (i.e. one or ones) and the head noun or the nominal group inside a noun phrase (NP). Consider the example sentence in (1) from The British National Corpus (2001), where the word one can be easily understood as room, from the preceding context. 1. The furniture in the lower room, which in every respect corresponds to the upper one, consists of one chair, of most antique and un- safe appearance.1 The context from where the anaphor gets its sense and/or reference from is called the antecedent. For 1Following the typographical conventions for one- anaphora and their antecedents by Gardiner (2003), we denote an antecedent noun phrase like this and one-anaphora like this. one-anaphora, the antecedent can be a single word (head noun of the antecedent NP), as in (1), or group of nominal words – a compound noun or a head noun with its dependent, as in (2). However, the antecedent of one anaphora is never the whole NP. 2. There was much competition during the war as to who could come up with the best bomb story , and my mother had a great time telling this one to all the aunties... One-anaphora can represent a particular case of identity-of-sense anaphora where the anaphor shares only the sense of the antecedent and not the complete reference. This category of one-anaphora is named as sense sharing one-anaphors as op- posed to ”contrastive anaphors” presented in (1) (Luperfoy, 1991), where the ”lower” room that the anaphor refers to is in contrast with the the ”upper” room as antecedent. Such an interpretation can also be vague in some cases, as in (2), where the bomb story that the mother is telling might …

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