Resolving Anaphora in a Portable Natural Language Front End to Databases

An analysis of the evolution of Natural Language front ends in the last three decades shows that the growth in portability brought, as a side effect, the narrowing of the provided coverage of contextually based linguistic phenomena, such as anaphora and ellipsis. This paper presents the design and state of development of a computational mechanism which provides pronominal Anaphora Resolution within the environment of a highly portable Natural Language front end to databases, SQUIRREL3 Simple cases of Ellipsis are also treated by the proposed model. An Overview of SQUIRREL is presented, followed by a description of the Discourse Module and the results achieved so far. The prototype is implemented in C-Prolog.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: ANLP
• Authors: Flávia A. Barros, Anne N. De Roeck
• Keywords: ANLP 1994, Natural Language, Portable Natural Language, Pronominal Anaphora Resolution