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Why people care. Classic: "text understanding" Information extraction, information retrieval, summarization…. What influences pronoun resolution?. Syntax Semantics/world knowledge. Why syntax matters. John kicked Bill. Mary told him to go home.
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Why people care • Classic: "text understanding" • Information extraction, information retrieval, summarization…
What influences pronoun resolution? • Syntax • Semantics/world knowledge
Why syntax matters • John kicked Bill. Mary told him to go home. • Bill was kicked by John. Mary told him to go home. • John kicked Bill. Mary punched him.
Why syntax matters • John kicked Bill. Mary told him to go home. • Bill was kicked by John. Mary told him to go home. • John kicked Bill. Mary punched him. John
Why syntax matters • John kicked Bill. Mary told him to go home. • Bill was kicked by John. Mary told him to go home. • John kicked Bill. Mary punched him. Bill
Why syntax matters • John kicked Bill. Mary told him to go home. • Bill was kicked by John. Mary told him to go home. • John kicked Bill. Mary punched him. Bill
Why syntax matters • John kicked Bill. Mary told him to go home. • Bill was kicked by John. Mary told him to go home. • John kicked Bill. Mary punched him. Grammatical role hierarchy
Why syntax matters • John kicked Bill. Mary told him to go home. • Bill was kicked by John. Mary told him to go home. • John kicked Bill. Mary punched him. Grammatical role parallelism
Why semantics matters The city council denied the demonstrators a permit because they {feared|advocated} violence.
Why semantics matters The city council denied the demonstrators a permit because they {feared|advocated} violence.
Why semantics matters The city council denied the demonstrators a permit because they {feared|advocated} violence.
Why knowledge matters • John hit Bill. He was severely injured.
Margaret Thatcher admires Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush absolutely worships her. Why Knowledge Matters
A search-based solution • Hobbs 1978: Resolving pronoun references
Hobbs 1978 • Assessment of difficulty of problem • Incidence of the phenomenon • A simple algorithm that has become a baseline
Hobbs’s point …the naïve approach is quite good. Computationally speaking, it will be a long time before a semantically based algorithm is sophisticated enough to perform as well, and these results set a very high standard for any other approach to aim for.
Hobbs’s point Yet there is every reason to pursue a semantically based approach. The naïve algorithm does not work. Any one can think of examples where it fails. In these cases it not only fails; it gives no indication that it has failed and offers no help in finding the real antecedent. (p. 345)