---
title: "Sense Anaphoric Pronouns: Am I One? — Recasens 2016"
description: "The paper addresses sense anaphora, in which a pronoun takes its meaning from an earlier expression but refers to a different entity, as in \"existing…"
authors: ["Marta Recasens", "Zhichao Hu", "Olivia Rhinehart"]
year: 2016
venue: "Proceedings of the Workshop on Coreference Resolution Beyond OntoNotes (CORBON 2016)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W16-0701/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/w16-0701"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/recasens-2016-sense-anaphoric-pronouns-am-i/"
---
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# Sense Anaphoric Pronouns: Am I One?

**Authors:** [Marta Recasens](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/marta-recasens/), Zhichao Hu, Olivia Rhinehart · **Year:** 2016 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Workshop on Coreference Resolution Beyond OntoNotes (CORBON 2016) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W16-0701/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W16-0701.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/w16-0701](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w16-0701) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2500439098)

**Citations:** 9 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [5](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper addresses sense anaphora, in which a pronoun takes its meaning from an earlier expression but refers to a different entity, as in "existing ones" pointing back to "loans". Earlier computational work studied only *one*. This study covers a much broader set of forms: *one(s)*, indefinite quantifiers, numerals, demonstratives (*that*, *those*) and *other/another*. The authors wrote annotation guidelines and had four annotators mark anaphors and their antecedents in a third of English OntoNotes. The result is the SAnaNotes corpus, which they release publicly. They then trained a LIBLINEAR SVM that separates anaphoric uses from other uses, such as generics and numerals. The classifier uses only local lexical and syntactic features. On *one/ones* it clearly outperforms reimplementations of Gardiner (2003) and Ng et al. (2005), and it also extends to the new anaphor categories. Numerals and indefinites remain difficult because there are few positive examples. The work matters because unresolved sense anaphors leave a gap in what a text means. The authors expect such anaphors to be more frequent in conversational input, such as voice queries.

## Key points
- SAnaNotes covers 1 163 OntoNotes documents, sampled to preserve the domain mix. It is released at github.com/dmorr-google/sense-anaphora.
- Inter-annotator agreement was measured on 25 documents annotated by all four annotators. Anaphor identification reached Fleiss' κ = .67, and antecedent span agreement was 63%. The phenomenon is rare, at about 0.6 anaphors per document and 4.3% / 3.3% anaphoric candidates in the train / test splits.
- The features cover the candidate token, a two-token window on each side, the syntactic head and the leftmost child. For each of these, the model uses word, POS, dependency label and Brown cluster, plus conjoined pairs, giving 31 feature types in total.
- On *one/ones*, the system reaches 79.01% F1. The reimplemented Gardiner (2003) system scores 56.20% and Ng et al. (2005) scores 58.80%.
- Across all categories, the system reaches 61.80% F1, or 67.34% excluding numerals. Ng et al.'s features score 31.30% and 38.60% on the same settings.

*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

5 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 3 not yet.

- [NoEl: An Annotated Corpus for Noun Ellipsis in English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/gram-2020-khullar-noel-annotated-corpus-noun-ellipsis/)
- [A Predictive Model for Notional Anaphora in English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/zeldes-2018-predictive-model-notional-anaphora-english/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{recasens2016sense,
  title = {{Sense Anaphoric Pronouns: Am I One?}},
  author = {Recasens, Marta and Hu, Zhichao and Rhinehart, Olivia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Coreference Resolution Beyond OntoNotes (CORBON 2016)},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/w16-0701},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w16-0701}
}
```

- [← previous Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/kipf-2016-semi-supervised-classification-graph-convolutional/)
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- [↑ back to papers of 2016](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2016/page/3/)

## References

20 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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