Kernel-Based Pronoun Resolution with Structured Syntactic Knowledge

Xiaofeng Yang, Jian Su, Chew Lim Tan

Abstract: Syntactic knowledge is important for pronoun resolution. Traditionally, the syntactic information for pronoun resolution is represented in terms of features that have to be selected and defined heuristically. In the paper, we propose a kernel-based method that can automatically mine the syntactic information from the parse trees for pronoun resolution. Specifically, we utilize the parse trees directly as a structured feature and apply kernel functions to this feature, as well as other normal features, to learn the resolution classifier. In this way, our approach avoids the efforts of decoding the parse trees into the set of flat syntactic features. The experimental results show that our approach can bring significant performance improvement and is reliably effective for the pronoun resolution task.