--- title: "Robust Pronoun Resolution with Limited — Mitkov 1998" description: "Classic anaphora resolution systems depend on rich syntactic, semantic and domain knowledge, which is expensive to build and slow to run." authors: ["Ruslan Mitkov"] year: 1998 venue: "36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Volume 2" source: "https://aclanthology.org/P98-2143/" doi: "10.3115/980691.980712" licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mitkov-1998-robust-pronoun-resolution-limited-knowledge/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mitkov-1998-robust-pronoun-resolution-limited-knowledge/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [1998](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/1998/) / Robust Pronoun Resolution with Limited Knowledge # Robust Pronoun Resolution with Limited Knowledge **Authors:** [Ruslan Mitkov](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ruslan-mitkov/) · **Year:** 1998 · **Venue:** 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Volume 2 · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P98-2143/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P98-2143.pdf) · [DOI 10.3115/980691.980712](https://doi.org/10.3115/980691.980712) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2217772701) **Citations:** 279 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [78](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary Classic anaphora resolution systems depend on rich syntactic, semantic and domain knowledge, which is expensive to build and slow to run. Mitkov proposes a lightweight alternative for resolving pronouns in technical manuals that needs only part-of-speech tagged text and simple noun-phrase rules, with no full parsing. For each pronoun, the system: - gathers noun phrases to its left within the current and two previous sentences, - discards candidates that fail gender/number agreement, using a hand-built list of agreement exceptions, - scores the remaining candidates with empirically chosen "antecedent indicators" such as definiteness, givenness, lexical reiteration, collocation patterns, referential distance and term status. The highest total score wins, and fixed tie-breaking rules settle equal scores. On English manuals the method resolved 89.7% of pronouns. This beat two baselines and a manually simulated CogNIAC. Ported to Polish and Arabic with small changes, it scored even higher. The work shows that cheap, preference-based heuristics can be robust and fairly portable across languages, at least within a restricted genre. ## Key points - Each indicator assigns a candidate a score of -1, 0, 1 or 2. Ties are broken by immediate reference, then collocation, then indicating verbs, and finally recency. - English results: 89.7% success, versus 31.55%/48.55% (recall/precision) for a most-recent-subject baseline and 65.95% for a most-recent-NP baseline. CogNIAC ("resolve all", simulated manually) reached 75%. - The most discriminative indicators were immediate reference (100%), non-prepositional NP (92.2%) and collocation (90.9%). The most frequently applied was referential distance (98.9% of anaphors). - Polish adaptation: evaluated on 180 pronouns from online technical manuals, 120 of them exophoric. It reached 93.3% success (critical success rate 86.2%), compared with baselines of 23.7% and 68.4%. - Arabic adaptation: 95.2% success (critical 89.3%) on 63 anaphors from a Sony technical manual. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [Coreference resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/coreference-resolution/) ## Cited by Cited by 78 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 26 of them have a page here, 52 not yet. - [Evaluation Tool for Rule-based Anaphora Resolution Methods](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/barbu-2001-evaluation-tool-rule-based-anaphora/) - [Q-learning pour la résolution des anaphores pronominales en langue arabe (Q-learning for pronominal anaphora resolution in Arabic texts)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bouzid-2019-q-learning-pour-la-resolution/) - [A Generic Anaphora Resolution Engine for Indian Languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/devi-2014-generic-anaphora-resolution-engine-indian/) - [Multilingual Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/harabagiu-2000-multilingual-coreference-resolution/) - [A Coreference Corpus and Resolution System for Dutch](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hendrickx-2008-coreference-corpus-resolution-system-dutch/) - [Employing the Centering Theory in Pronoun Resolution from the Semantic Perspective](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kong-2009-employing-centering-theory-pronoun-resolution/) - [Automatic Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in English Texts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/liang-2003-automatic-pronominal-anaphora-resolution-english/) - [Pronominal and Sortal Anaphora Resolution for Biomedical Literature](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lin-2004-pronominal-sortal-anaphora-resolution-biomedical/) - [A Mention-Synchronous Coreference Resolution Algorithm Based On the Bell Tree](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/luo-2004-mention-synchronous-coreference-resolution-algorithm/) - [Multi-Lingual Coreference Resolution With Syntactic Features](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/luo-2005-multi-lingual-coreference-resolution-syntactic/) - [Comparing Knowledge Sources for Nominal Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/markert-2005-comparing-knowledge-sources-nominal-anaphora/) - [Multigraph Clustering for Unsupervised Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/martschat-2013-multigraph-clustering-unsupervised-coreference-resolution/) - [Semantic Class Induction and Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ng-2007-semantic-class-induction-coreference-resolution/) - [An Algorithm for Anaphora Resolution in Spanish Texts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/palomar-2001-algorithm-anaphora-resolution-spanish-texts/) - [Acquiring Lexical Knowledge for Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/poesio-2002-acquiring-lexical-knowledge-anaphora-resolution/) - [Supervised Models for Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/rahman-2009-supervised-models-coreference-resolution/) - [SemEval-2010 Task 1: Coreference Resolution in Multiple Languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/recasens-2009-semeval-2010-task-1-coreference/) - [A Corpus-Based Evaluation of Centering and Pronoun Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tetreault-2001-corpus-based-evaluation-centering-pronoun/) - [Identification des reprises et interprétation automatique des expressions pronominales dans des textes en français](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/trouilleux-2001-identification-reprises-interpretation-automatique/) - [Coreference Resolution Using Competition Learning Approach](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yang-2003-coreference-resolution-competition-learning-approach/) - [Improving Pronoun Resolution by Incorporating Coreferential Information of Candidates](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yang-2004-improving-pronoun-resolution-incorporating-coreferential/) - [Improving Pronoun Resolution Using Statistics-Based Semantic Compatibility Information](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yang-2005-improving-pronoun-resolution-statistics-based/) - [Kernel-Based Pronoun Resolution with Structured Syntactic Knowledge](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yang-2006-kernel-based-pronoun-resolution-structured/) - [UBIU: A Language-Independent System for Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhekova-2010-ubiu-language-independent-system-coreference/) - [A High-Performance Coreference Resolution System using a Constraint-based Multi-Agent Strategy](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhou-2004-high-performance-coreference-resolution-system/) - [Context-Sensitive Convolution Tree Kernel for Pronoun Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhou-2008-context-sensitive-convolution-tree-kernel/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{mitkov1998robust, title = {{Robust Pronoun Resolution with Limited Knowledge}}, author = {Mitkov, Ruslan}, booktitle = {36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Volume 2}, year = {1998}, doi = {10.3115/980691.980712}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/980691.980712} } ``` - [← previous PCFG Models of Linguistic Tree Representations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/johnson-1998-pcfg-models-linguistic-tree-representations/) - [next → Studies in the Syntax of the Peshitta of 1 Kings](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/williams-1998-studies-syntax-peshitta-1-kings/) - [↑ back to papers of 1998](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/1998/) ## References 23 references, 9 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Baldwin, Breck. 1997. "CogNIAC: high precision coreference with limited knowledge and linguistic resources". Proceedings of the ACL'97/EACL'97 workshop on Operational factors in practical, robust anaphora resolution, 38-45, Madrid, Spain. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Baldwin%2C+Breck%2E+1997%2E+%22CogNIAC%3A+high+precision+coreference+with+limited+knowledge+and+linguistic+resources%22%2E+Proceedings+of+the+ACL%2797%2FEACL%2797+workshop+on+Operational+factors+in+practical%2C+robust+anap) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/baldwin-1997-cogniac-high-precision-coreference-limited/) 2. Brennan, S., M. Fridman and C. Pollard. 1987. A centering approach to pronouns. Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the ACL (ACL'87), 155-162, Stanford, CA, USA. 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