• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.32 no.10
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• pp.990-1002
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• 2005

To generate coherent texts, it is important to produce appropriate pronouns to refer to previously-mentioned things in a discourse. Specifically, we focus on pronominalization by zero pronouns which frequently occur in Korean. This paper investigates zero pronouns in Korean based on the cost-based centering theory, especially focusing on the center transitions of adjacent utterances. In previous centering works, only one type of nominal entity has been considered as the target of pronominalization, even though other entities are frequently pronominalized as zero pronouns. To resolve this problem, and explain the reference phenomena of real texts, four types of nominal entity (Npair, Ninter, Nintra, and Nnon) from centering theory are defined with the concept of inter-, intra-, and pairwise salience. For each entity type, a case study of zero phenomena is performed through analyzing corpus and building a pronominalization model. This study shows that the zero phenomena of entities which have been neglected in previous centering works are explained via the renter transition of the second previous utterance. We also show that in Ninter, Nintra, and Nnon, pronominalization accuracy achieved by complex combination of several types of features is completely or nearly achieved by using the second previous utterance's transition across genres.