--- title: "Resolving bridging references in unrestricted — Poesio 1997" description: "The paper tackles automatic interpretation of definite descriptions (DDs) in domain-independent written English, focusing on bridging references." authors: ["Massimo Poesio", "Renata Vieira", "Simone Teufel"] year: 1997 venue: "Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution for Unrestricted Texts" source: "https://aclanthology.org/W97-1301/" 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/poesio-1997-resolving-bridging-references-unrestricted-text/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/poesio-1997-resolving-bridging-references-unrestricted-text/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/) / [1997](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/1997/) / Resolving bridging references in unrestricted text # Resolving bridging references in unrestricted text **Authors:** [Massimo Poesio](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/massimo-poesio/), [Renata Vieira](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/renata-vieira/), [Simone Teufel](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/simone-teufel/) · **Year:** 1997 · **Venue:** Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution for Unrestricted Texts · **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/W97-1301/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W97-1301.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1968905923) **Citations:** 87 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [29](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary The paper tackles automatic interpretation of definite descriptions (DDs) in domain-independent written English, focusing on bridging references. These are DDs whose antecedent can only be found through some reasoning, such as a different head noun or a part-whole link. The work builds on a corpus study of Wall Street Journal articles. In that study, one fifth of DDs were bridging cases, which an earlier rule-based prototype did not handle. The authors divide bridging DDs into six processing-oriented classes. Each class gets its own treatment: - WordNet lookups for lexical relations - heuristics for proper names and compound-noun modifiers - a nominalization idea for event anchors Experiments show WordNet links many DD–anchor pairs but produces far too many false positives. Its coverage of synonymy and meronymy is incomplete, and blind search is computationally expensive. Adding the heuristics to the first prototype raised overall recall from 56% to 65%, with a small precision drop from 84% to 82%. The study matters because it shows what generic lexical resources can and cannot contribute when no hand-built domain knowledge exists. ## Key points - **Corpus:** 1040 DDs from parsed WSJ texts (ACL/DCI CD-ROM), split as follows: - 204 bridging (20%) - 312 same-head anaphoric (30%) - 492 larger situation/unfamiliar (47%) - **Six bridging classes:** Syn/Hyp/Mer, Names, Compound Nouns, Events, Discourse Topic and Inference. The last two, plus most event cases, remain beyond the system's reach. - **WordNet anchor search** over a five-sentence window: - Some relation was suggested for 107 of 204 bridging DDs, but only 34 had a correct anchor. - A Sidner-style stack-based search gave 30 correct and 76 wrong anchors (28% precision). - Coordinate-sister links were the least reliable. - **Manually identified syn/hyp/mer pairs:** on 70 such pairs, WordNet reached 46% recall and 84% precision. Synonymy had the weakest recall. - **Proper names:** WordNet supplied entity types for 69% of names, and 53% of DDs referring back to names were resolved. *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/) ## Cited by Cited by 29 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 14 of them have a page here, 15 not yet. - [A Rule-Based System for Unrestricted Bridging Resolution: Recognizing Bridging Anaphora and Finding Links to Antecedents](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/hou-2014-rule-based-system-unrestricted-bridging/) - [A Deterministic Algorithm for Bridging Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/hou-2018-deterministic-algorithm-bridging-anaphora-resolution/) - [Enhanced Word Representations for Bridging Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/hou-2018-enhanced-word-representations-bridging-anaphora/) - [Unrestricted Bridging Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/hou-2018-unrestricted-bridging-resolution/) - [Bridging Anaphora Resolution as Question Answering](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/hou-2020-bridging-anaphora-resolution-as-question/) - [Bridging Resolution: A Survey of the State of the Art](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/kobayashi-2020-bridging-resolution-survey-state-art/) - [What's in a Bridge?: A Descriptive, Multi-Genre Analysis of the GUMBridge Corpus for Varieties of Bridging Anaphora](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/levine-2026-what-s-bridge-descriptive-multi/) - [Comparing Knowledge Sources for Nominal Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/markert-2005-comparing-knowledge-sources-nominal-anaphora/) - [Acquiring Lexical Knowledge for Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/poesio-2002-acquiring-lexical-knowledge-anaphora-resolution/) - [Learning to Resolve Bridging References](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/poesio-2004-learning-resolve-bridging-references/) - [Introducing the Prague Discourse Treebank 1.0](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/polakova-2013-introducing-prague-discourse-treebank-1/) - [Bridging resolution: Task definition, corpus resources and rule-based experiments](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/roesiger-2018-bridging-resolution-task-definition-corpus/) - [Rule- and Learning-based Methods for Bridging Resolution in the ARRAU Corpus](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/roesiger-2018-rule-learning-based-methods-bridging/) - [BASHI: A Corpus of Wall Street Journal Articles Annotated with Bridging Links](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/rosiger-2018-bashi-corpus-wall-street-journal/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{poesio1997resolving, title = {{Resolving bridging references in unrestricted text}}, author = {Poesio, Massimo and Vieira, Renata and Teufel, Simone}, booktitle = {Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution for Unrestricted Texts}, year = {1997}, doi = {10.3115/1598819.1598820}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1598819.1598820} } ``` - [← previous Probabilistic Coreference in Information Extraction](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/kehler-1997-probabilistic-coreference-information-extraction/) - [next → Stochastic Inversion Transduction Grammars and Bilingual Parsing of Parallel Corpora](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/wu-1997-stochastic-inversion-transduction-grammars-bilingual/) - [↑ back to papers of 1997](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/1997/) ## References 19 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. 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