---
title: "Importance of Pronominal Anaphora Resolution — Vicedo 2000"
description: "The paper asks whether open-domain Question Answering systems lose useful information when they ignore pronouns in documents."
authors: ["José L. Vicedo", "Antonio Ferrández"]
year: 2000
venue: "Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/P00-1070/"
doi: "10.3115/1075218.1075288"
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/vicedo-2000-importance-pronominal-anaphora-resolution-question/"
---
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# Importance of Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in Question Answering Systems

**Authors:** José L. Vicedo, [Antonio Ferrández](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/antonio-ferrandez/) · **Year:** 2000 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for 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/P00-1070/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P00-1070.pdf) · [DOI 10.3115/1075218.1075288](https://doi.org/10.3115/1075218.1075288) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2001812656)

**Citations:** 61 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [13](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper asks whether open-domain Question Answering systems lose useful information when they ignore pronouns in documents. The authors first measure how often pronouns occur in ten text collections used in TREC-8 QA and in IR testing. Pronoun use is heavy in newswire and much lower in technical abstracts, where "it/its" dominates. They then build a full pipeline to test the effect. A Salton-style IR engine (idf weighting, Porter stemming, cosine similarity) retrieves documents. The SUPAR parser, which uses Slot Unification Grammar, resolves pronominal anaphora in both queries and documents without semantic resources. A sentence-extraction QA module ranks sentences, scoring a resolved pronoun with the weight of its antecedent. Tests on the LAT corpus compare the system with and without resolution. Resolution raises the share of correct answers from 29.03% to 54.84%. The gain is largest when query terms appear only as pronouns in the answer sentence. The authors conclude that pronoun resolution should be a standard part of open-domain QA, and that it is essential for noun-phrase extraction systems.

## Key points
- The pronominal reference ratio ranges from 55.20% in LAT down to 9.05% in CRANFIELD. News collections (LAT, FBIS, TIME, FT) lie between 35.96% and 55.20% and contain many third-person pronouns.
- SUPAR combines a POS tagger, partial parsing, statistical knowledge, c-command and morphological agreement constraints, and preference heuristics. It does not use WordNet or other semantic knowledge.
- Evaluation used 93 questions, the subset of 150 for which the IR step found the relevant document. These were split into groups A, B and C according to how pronouns relate to the answer.
- Overall, target sentences in the system's output rose from 41.94% to 54.84%, and correct answers from 29.03% to 54.84%. For group C, target sentences rose from 29.03% to 67.74%.
- On a rebalanced set of 83 questions, matched to LAT's pronoun ratio, the gains were similar: +10.84 points for target sentences and +22.89 points for correct answers.

*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

13 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 11 not yet.

- [Contrastive Representation Learning for Cross-Document Coreference Resolution of Events and Entities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/hsu-2022-contrastive-representation-learning-cross-document/)
- [A Public Reference Implementation of the RAP Anaphora Resolution Algorithm](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/qiu-2004-public-reference-implementation-rap-anaphora/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{vicedo2000importance,
  title = {{Importance of Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in Question Answering Systems}},
  author = {Vicedo, José L. and Ferrández, Antonio},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2000},
  doi = {10.3115/1075218.1075288},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1075218.1075288}
}
```

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## References

16 references, 0 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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