Focusing for Pronoun Resolution in English Discourse: An Implementation

Abstract

Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon like anaphora. Candy Sidner formalized focusing in her 1979 MIT PhD thesis and devised several algorithms to resolve definite anaphora including pronouns. She presented her theory in a computational framework but did not generally implement the algorithms. Her algorithms related to focusing and pronoun resolution are implemented in this thesis. This implementation provides a better comprehension of the theory both from a conceptual and a computational point of view. The resulting program is tested on different discourse segments, and evaluation and analysis of the experiments are presented together with the statistical results.