Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution: A Joint Unsupervised Discourse-Aware Model Rivaling State-of-the-Art Resolvers

Chen Chen, Vincent Ng

Abstract: We propose an unsupervised probabilistic model for zero pronoun resolution. To our knowledge, this is the first such model that (1) is trained on zero pronouns in an unsupervised manner; (2) jointly identifies and resolves anaphoric zero pronouns; and (3) exploits discourse information provided by a salience model. Experiments demonstrate that our unsupervised model significantly outperforms its state-of-the-art unsupervised counterpart when resolving the Chinese zero pronouns in the OntoNotes corpus.