Processing of Spanish definite descriptions

Abstract

Natural language processing systems require a suitable linguistic co-reference resolution. Many works have been focused on pro-nominal or adjective anaphora resolution in English and Spanish texts. However, few of them have been focused on the resolution of definite descriptions. Traditionally, anaphora resolution was not usually treated properly as a linguistic phenomenon, due fundamentally to the lack of linguistic knowledge or suitable sources of information for its resolution. In this work, a method for the resolution of the identity co-reference produced by definite descriptions in Spanish texts is presented. This method is based on the linguistic knowledge acquired by POS-tagger, synonymous dictionary and relationships between names and verbs resources. This method uses a system of restrictions and preferences in order to obtain the correct antecedent. The method achieves a precision of 95% for the identification of non-anaphoric and anaphoric uses of definite descriptions. Moreover, the method achieves a precision of 80% for the reference resolution task. In addition, a profound study of linguistic characteristics of definite descriptions in a Spanish corpus has been made. From this study, a classification of the different definite description types has been obtained. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.