Towards Better Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution from Discourse Perspective

摘要

Chinese zero pronoun (ZP) resolution plays an important role in natural language understanding. This paper focuses on improving Chinese ZP resolution from discourse perspective. In particular, various kinds of discourse information are employed in both stages of ZP resolution. During the ZP detection stage, we first propose an elementary discourse unit (EDU) based method to generate ZP candidates from discourse perspective and then exploit relevant discourse context to help better identify ZPs. During the ZP resolution stage, we employ a tree-style discourse rhetorical structure to improve the resolution. Evaluation on OntoNotes shows the significant importance of discourse information to the performance of ZP resolution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to improve Chinese ZP resolution from discourse perspective.