What is it? Disambiguating the different readings of the pronoun ‘it’

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of predicting one of three functions for the English pronoun ‘it’: anaphoric, event reference or pleonastic. This disambiguation is valuable in the context of machine translation and coreference resolution. We present experiments using a MAXENT classifier trained on gold-standard data and self-training experiments of an RNN trained on silver-standard data, annotated using the MAXENT classifier. Lastly, we report on an analysis of the strengths of these two models.