An Algorithm for Anaphora Resolution in Aviation Safety Reports

摘要

While the general problem of determining the referent of a pronoun like it, he or she is quite difficult, by constraining the domain of discourse, and by constraining the task, it is possible to achieve accurate resolution of the antecedents of pronouns in certain contexts. In this paper, we constrain the domain of discourse by considering only aviation safety reports, and consider the task of pronominal resolution in the context of entity extraction in these aviation texts. In doing so, we are able to provide an algorithm that is better suited to the task than general purpose anaphora resolution algorithms, and which should be applicable to other domains by incorporating similar constraints.