--- title: "Anaphora Resolution — Carbonell 1988" description: "Carbonell and Brown address intersentential anaphora: pronouns and similar expressions whose antecedents appear in earlier utterances." authors: ["Jaime G. Carbonell", "Ralf D. Brown"] year: 1988 venue: "Coling Budapest 1988 Volume 1: International Conference on Computational Linguistics" source: "https://aclanthology.org/C88-1021/" 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/papers/carbonell-1988-anaphora-resolution-multi-strategy-approach/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/carbonell-1988-anaphora-resolution-multi-strategy-approach/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/) / [1988](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/1988/) / Anaphora Resolution: A Multi-Strategy Approach # Anaphora Resolution: A Multi-Strategy Approach **Authors:** [Jaime G. Carbonell](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/jaime-g-carbonell/), Ralf D. Brown · **Year:** 1988 · **Venue:** Coling Budapest 1988 Volume 1: International Conference on Computational Linguistics · **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/C88-1021/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/C88-1021.pdf) **Citations:** [38](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary Carbonell and Brown address intersentential anaphora: pronouns and similar expressions whose antecedents appear in earlier utterances. Resolving these depends heavily on semantic and pragmatic knowledge, not only on syntax. They argue against a single monolithic resolver. Instead, they propose combining several independent strategies, each based on a different knowledge source, such as sentence syntax, case-frame semantics, dialog structure, and world knowledge. Some strategies are hard constraints that eliminate candidates. Others are preferences that rank the remaining ones. The approach was implemented in CMU's Universal Parser, a machine-translation architecture. It was tested on a small set of constructed everyday-event discourses, such as giving aspirin, taking a cake, and characters going up a hill. These examples were modeled on phenomena seen in real human-computer interface dialogs. The main claim concerns cognitive plausibility. Where the strategies agree, human subjects pick the same single referent. Where the strategies propose conflicting candidates, humans also find the reference ambiguous. The work matters because it offers a modular, practical way to handle broader anaphora classes than earlier limited-domain systems. ## Key points - Constraint strategies remove candidates: - **local anaphor constraints** (number, gender, case) - **case-role semantic constraints**, e.g., the object of "eat" should be edible - **precondition/postcondition constraints**, e.g., after "give," the giver no longer holds the object - Preference strategies rank candidates. **Case-role persistence** favors the antecedent that filled the same semantic case role, such as recipient, earlier. **Semantic alignment** favors keeping the same underlying action roles, such as source vs. destination for "there." - The authors state that case-role persistence had not been proposed or implemented before their work, yet it accounts for many resolutions in their sample. - Earlier systems such as RUS and XCALIBUR implemented only rudimentary variants of some of these strategies. - Implementation traces show candidates being filtered and scored step by step. Agreement among several strategies on one referent increases confidence. No quantitative accuracy figures are reported in the available text. *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/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [Coreference resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/coreference-resolution/) ## Cited by Cited by 38 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 14 of them have a page here, 24 not yet. - [Resolving Object and Attribute Coreference in Opinion Mining](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ding-2010-resolving-object-attribute-coreference-opinion/) - [Multilingual Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/harabagiu-2000-multilingual-coreference-resolution/) - [Using Semantic Relations to Refine Coreference Decisions](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ji-2005-semantic-relations-refine-coreference-decisions/) - [Employing the Centering Theory in Pronoun Resolution from the Semantic Perspective](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/kong-2009-employing-centering-theory-pronoun-resolution/) - [An Algorithm for Pronominal Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/lappin-1994-algorithm-pronominal-anaphora-resolution/) - [An Integrated Model for Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/mitkov-1994-integrated-model-anaphora-resolution/) - [Anaphora Resolution in Machine Translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/mitkov-1995-anaphora-resolution-machine-translation/) - [Factors in anaphora resolution: they are not the only things that matter. A case study based on two different approaches](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/mitkov-1997-factors-anaphora-resolution-they-are/) - [Multilingual Robust Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/mitkov-1998-multilingual-robust-anaphora-resolution/) - [Robust Pronoun Resolution with Limited Knowledge](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/mitkov-1998-robust-pronoun-resolution-limited-knowledge/) - [An Algorithm for Anaphora Resolution in Spanish Texts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/palomar-2001-algorithm-anaphora-resolution-spanish-texts/) - [Functional Centering – Grounding Referential Coherence on Information Structure](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/strube-1999-functional-centering-grounding-referential-coherence/) - [Anaphor Resolution and the Scope of Syntactic Constraints](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/stuckardt-1996-anaphor-resolution-scope-syntactic-constraints/) - [A High-Performance Coreference Resolution System using a Constraint-based Multi-Agent Strategy](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/zhou-2004-high-performance-coreference-resolution-system/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{carbonell1988anaphora, title = {{Anaphora Resolution: A Multi-Strategy Approach}}, author = {Carbonell, Jaime G. and Brown, Ralf D.}, booktitle = {Coling Budapest 1988 Volume 1: International Conference on Computational Linguistics}, year = {1988}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/C88-1021/} } ``` - [← previous An Integrated Framework for Semantic and Pragmatic Interpretation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/pollack-1988-integrated-framework-semantic-pragmatic-interpretation/) - [next → Discourse Deixis: Reference to Discourse Segments](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/webber-1988-discourse-deixis-reference-discourse-segments/) - [↑ back to papers of 1988](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/1988/) ## References 18 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Bimbaum, L. and Selfridge, M. 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