--- title: "Automatic Processing of Large Corpora for the — Dagan 1990" description: "Hand-built selectional constraints are a standard way to resolve ambiguity, but writing them for broad domains is too costly." authors: ["Ido Dagan", "Alon Itai"] year: 1990 venue: "COLING 1990 Volume 3: Papers presented to the 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics" source: "https://aclanthology.org/C90-3063/" 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/dagan-1990-automatic-processing-large-corpora-resolution/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/dagan-1990-automatic-processing-large-corpora-resolution/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/) / [1990](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/1990/) / Automatic Processing of Large Corpora for the Resolution of Anaphora References # Automatic Processing of Large Corpora for the Resolution of Anaphora References **Authors:** [Ido Dagan](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/ido-dagan/), [Alon Itai](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/alon-itai/) · **Year:** 1990 · **Venue:** COLING 1990 Volume 3: Papers presented to the 13th 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/C90-3063/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/C90-3063.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2084799720) **Citations:** 111 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [33](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary Hand-built selectional constraints are a standard way to resolve ambiguity, but writing them for broad domains is too costly. Dagan and Itai propose learning such constraints automatically from cooccurrence statistics in a large, unannotated corpus. In an acquisition phase, sentences from the Hansard corpus (Canadian parliamentary proceedings) are parsed with the PEG parser. Post-processing then normalizes the parses into subject-verb, verb-object and adjective-noun relations, and frequency counts are stored. In a disambiguation phase, each candidate antecedent of the pronoun "it" is substituted for the pronoun. A candidate is kept only if the resulting pattern occurs often enough in the corpus. On 59 filtered test sentences, the method gave a decision in about two thirds of cases and was usually correct when it did. It often narrowed the choice to a single referent, which classic semantic constraints rarely achieve. The authors also found that parsing errors and ambiguity in the unannotated corpus did little harm. The work shows that statistics layered on conventional parsers can feasibly supply semantic knowledge for disambiguation. ## Key points - Statistics were gathered from roughly 28 million words of the Hansard corpus, which totals about 60M words. Only around 10,000 relevant sentences were actually parsed with the PEG parser. - The test set had 59 occurrences of "it". Each had between 2 and 5 candidate referents, averaging 2.8, all taken from the same sentence. A pattern counted as approved at 5 or more occurrences. - Coverage was 38/59 (64%), and accuracy on the covered cases was 33/38 (87%). - In 18 cases, only the correct referent was approved. Traditional selectional constraints could have settled just 7 of these, consistent with Hobbs (1978). - Semantically valid patterns turned up far more often in unambiguous constructions than in ambiguous ones. As a result, wrong patterns from bad parses seldom reached the threshold, and no lexical-sense confusion occurred. *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 33 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 14 of them have a page here, 19 not yet. - [Evaluation Tool for Rule-based Anaphora Resolution Methods](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/barbu-2001-evaluation-tool-rule-based-anaphora/) - [Unsupervised Learning of Contextual Role Knowledge for Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/bean-2004-unsupervised-learning-contextual-role-knowledge/) - [Bootstrapping Path-Based Pronoun Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/bergsma-2006-bootstrapping-path-based-pronoun-resolution/) - [A Generic Anaphora Resolution Engine for Indian Languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/devi-2014-generic-anaphora-resolution-engine-indian/) - [Decentralized Entity-Level Modeling for Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/durrett-2013-decentralized-entity-level-modeling-coreference/) - [Revisiting Selectional Preferences for Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/heinzerling-2017-revisiting-selectional-preferences-coreference-resolution/) - [Automatic Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in English Texts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/liang-2003-automatic-pronominal-anaphora-resolution-english/) - [Pronominal and Sortal Anaphora Resolution for Biomedical Literature](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/lin-2004-pronominal-sortal-anaphora-resolution-biomedical/) - [Multilingual Robust Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/mitkov-1998-multilingual-robust-anaphora-resolution/) - [Supervised Noun Phrase Coreference Research: The First Fifteen Years](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ng-2010-supervised-noun-phrase-coreference-research/) - [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/) - [Mind the GAP: A Balanced Corpus of Gendered Ambiguous Pronouns](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/webster-2018-mind-gap-balanced-corpus-gendered/) - [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{dagan1990automatic, title = {{Automatic Processing of Large Corpora for the Resolution of Anaphora References}}, author = {Dagan, Ido and Itai, Alon}, booktitle = {COLING 1990 Volume 3: Papers presented to the 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics}, year = {1990}, doi = {10.3115/991146.991209}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/991146.991209} } ``` - [← previous Anaphora Resolution in Slot Grammar](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/lappin-1990-anaphora-resolution-slot-grammar/) - [next → French and English determiners: Interaction of morphology, syntax and semantics in Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/abeille-1990-french-english-determiners-interaction-morphology/) - [↑ back to papers of 1990](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/1990/) ## References 8 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Brown, P., Cocke, J., Della Pietra, S., Della Pietra, V., Jelinek, F., Mercer, R.L. and Roossin P.S., A statistical approach to language translation, COLING 1988. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Brown%2C+P%2E%2C+Cocke%2C+J%2E%2C+Della+Pietra%2C+S%2E%2C+Della+Pietra%2C+V%2E%2C+Jelinek%2C+F%2E%2C+Mercer%2C+R%2EL%2E+and+Roossin+P%2ES%2E%2C+A+statistical+approach+to+language+translation%2C+COLING+1988%2E) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/brown-1988-statistical-approach-language-translation/) 2. Carbonell, J. G. and Brown, R. D. Anaphora resolution: A multi strategy approach, COLING I988. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Carbonell%2C+J%2E+G%2E+and+Brown%2C+R%2E+D%2E+Anaphora+resolution%3A+A+multi+strategy+approach%2C+COLING+I988%2E) 3. Church, K. W., A stochastic parts program and noun phrase parser for unrestricted text, ACL Conf. on Applied NLP, 1988. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Church%2C+K%2E+W%2E%2C+A+stochastic+parts+program+and+noun+phrase+parser+for+unrestricted+text%2C+ACL+Conf%2E+on+Applied+NLP%2C+1988%2E) 4. R. Grishman, L. Hirschman and Ngo Thanh Nhan, Discovery procedures for sublanguage selectional patterns initial experiments, Computational Linguislics, vol. 12,205-214, 1986. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R%2E+Grishman%2C+L%2E+Hirschman+and+Ngo+Thanh+Nhan%2C+Discovery+procedures+for+sublanguage+selectional+patterns+initial+experiments%2C+Computational+Linguislics%2C+vol%2E+12%2C205%2D214%2C+1986%2E) 5. ttobbs, J. R. Resolving pronoun references, Lingua, vol. 44,311-338, 1978. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=ttobbs%2C+J%2E+R%2E+Resolving+pronoun+references%2C+Lingua%2C+vol%2E+44%2C311%2D338%2C+1978%2E) 6. K. Jensen, PEG 1986: A broad-coverage computational syntax of English, Technical Report, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, 1986. 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