Towards Resolution of Bridging Descriptions

We present preliminary results concerning robust techniques for resolving bridging definite descriptions. We report our analysis of a collection of 20 Wall Street Journal articles from the Penn Treebank Corpus and our experiments with WordNet to identify relations between bridging descriptions and their antecedents. 1 Background As part of our research on definite description (DD) interpretation, we asked 3 subjects to classify the uses of DDs in a corpus using a taxonomy related to the proposals of (Hawkins, 1978) (Prince, 1981) and (Prince, 1992). Of the 1040 DDs in our corpus, 312 (30%) were identified as anaphoric (same head), 492 (47%) as larger situation/unfamiliar (Prince's discourse new), and 204 (20%) as bridging references, defined as uses of DDs whose antecedents-coreferential or not--have a different head noun; the remaining were classified as idioms or were cases for which the subjects expressed doubt--see (Poesio and Vieira, 1997) for a description of the experiment...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Renata Vieira, Simone Teufel
• Keywords: ACL 1997, ACL 2007, Definite Description, Head Nouns, Same Head