EM Works for Pronoun Anaphora Resolution

We present an algorithm for pronounanaphora (in English) that uses Expectation Maximization (EM) to learn virtually all of its parameters in an unsupervised fashion. While EM frequently fails to find good models for the tasks to which it is set, in this case it works quite well. We have compared it to several systems available on the web (all we have found so far). Our program significantly outperforms all of them. The algorithm is fast and robust, and has been made publically available for downloading.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: EACL
• Authors: Eugene Charniak, Micha Elsner
• Keywords: EACL 2009, Expectation Maximization, Natural Language Processing