Dealing with Cross-Sentential Anaphora Resolution in ALEP

Dealing with Cross-Sentential Anaphora Resolution in ALEP Thierry Declerck IMS, University of Stuttgart Azenbergstr. 12 D-70174 Stuttgart thierry@ims.uni-stuttgart.de Abstract The experiments described here have been done in connection with the LS-GRAM project, which is concerned with the develop- ment of large scale grammars and thus fore- seen the coverage of "real life texts". But in order to deal with such texts, it is also nec- essary to process linguistic units which are larger than sentences. The resolution of cross- sentential anaphora is one of the problems we have to deal with, when we switch towards the analysis of such larger linguistic units. In order to propose an analysis of the cross- sentential anaphora, one has to be able to re- fer back to an antecedent, which is to be found in a preceding sentence. This will be done on the basis of an information-passing frame- work. Using also the simple unification tech- nique a resolution of the pronoun can then be tried out: parts of the content informa- tion of the pronoun are going to be compared (unified) with specific parts of the content in- formation of the (possible) antecedent. 1 Introduction The experiments described below have been done in connection with the LS-GRAM project 1, which is concerned with the development of large scale grammars. The specifications of the project fore- seen the coverage of "real life texts", which have also been processed by a corpus analysis. The re- suits of the corpus analysis allowed us to determine a priority list of the linguistic phenonema to be de- scribed. And in order to deal with "real fife texts", it is also necessary to consider the processing of lin- guistic units, which are larger than sentences. And as it is well known, the interpretation of sentences embedded in larger units is often distinct from the one of sentences, which are standing on their own. 1The LS-GRAM (Large-Scale GRAMmars for EC languages) project is funded by the CEC under the number LRE 61029. The examples and the grammar descriptions I am using are taken from the German grammar, see (Rieder & al. IAI). The resolution of cross-sentential anaphora is one of the problems we have to deal with, when we switch towards the analysis (or synthesis) of such larger linguistic units. In order to give a correct interpre- tation of the cross-sentential anaphora, one has to be able to refer back to an antecedent, which is to be found in a preceding sentence, and I am using the term information-passing exactly in this sense: some information about a possible antecedent must be stored in order to be passed on to following sen- tences and to allow the anaphoric link, if some of the subsequent sentences are containing an anaphoric pronoun. Using the simple unification technique, as for the processing of other linguistic phenom- ena within ALEP, a resolution of the pronoun can then be tried out: parts of the content information of the pronoun are going to be compared (unified) with …

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