Reference Resolution Using Semantic Patterns in Japanese Newspaper Articles

Abstract

Reference resolution is one of the important tasks in natural language processing. In this paper, the author first determines the referents and their locations of "dousha", literally meaning "the same company", which appear in Japanese newspaper articles. Secondly, three heuristic methods, two of which use semantic information in text such as company names and their patterns, are proposed and tested on how accurately they identify the correct referents. The proposed methods based on semantic patterns show high accuracy for reference resolution of "dousha" (more than 90\%). This suggests that semantic pattern-matching methods are effective for reference resolution in newspaper articles.