• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.37 no.12
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• pp.928-935
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• 2010

Identifying the referents of omitted elements in a text is an important task to many natural language processing applications such as machine translation, information extraction and so on. These omitted elements are often called zero anaphors or zero pronouns, and are regarded as one of the most common forms of reference. However, since all zero elements do not refer to explicit objects which occur in the same text, recent work on zero anaphora resolution have attempted to identify the anaphoricity of zero pronouns. This paper focuses on intra-sentential anaphoricity determination of subject zero pronouns that frequently occur in Korean. Unlike previous studies on pair-wise comparisons, this study attempts to determine the intra-sentential anaphoricity of zero pronouns by learning directly the structure of clauses in which either non-anaphoric or inter-sentential subject zero pronouns occur. The proposed method outperforms baseline methods, and anaphoricity determination of zero pronouns will play an important role in resolving zero anaphora.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.2 no.12
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• pp.873-880
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• 2013

This paper approaches the problem of resolving Korean zero pronouns using Centering Theory modeling local coherence. Centering Theory has been widely used to resolve English pronouns. However, it is much difficult to apply the centering framework for zero pronoun resolution in languages such as Japanese and Korean. Since in particular the use of non-anaphoric zero pronouns without explicit antecedents is not considered in the Centering Theory of Grosz et al., the presence of non-anaphoric cases negatively affects the performance of the resolution system based on Centering Theory. To overcome this, this paper presents a method which determines the intra-sentential anaphoricity of zero pronouns in subject position by using relationships between clauses, and then identifies antecedents of zero subjects. In our experiments, the proposed method outperforms the baseline method relying solely on Centering Theory.