Zero Anaphora Resolution in Chinese Discourse

摘要

This paper explores various factors involved in the resolution of zero anaphora in Chinese discourse. Our study differs from previous ones in distinguishing three types of utterances and using clauses as the unit of resolution. The hierarchical structures of utterances enable us to process inter- and intra-utterance anaphora uniformly. Experimental results show that (1) clauses function significantly better than sentences as the unit of resolution, providing an improvement of precision from 36.0% to 63.4%; (2) the inclusion of cataphors and the use of NP forms as a criterion in Cf ranking do not lead to significant improvement of precision; and (3) when assigning antecedents to more than one zero pronoun in the same utterance, the criterion based on grammatical functions gives rise to better performance than that with linear orders.