Possessive pronominal anaphor resolution in Portuguese written texts

Abstract

This paper describes a proposal for Portuguese possessive pronominal anaphor (PPA) resolution, a problem little considered so far. Particularly, we address the problem of Portuguese 3rd person intrasentential PPAs seu/sua/seus/suas (his/her/their/its, for human and non-human subjects in English), which constitute 30% of pronominal occurrences in our corpus (Brazilian laws about environment protection). Considering some differences between PPAs and other kinds of anaphors, such as personal or demonstrative pronouns, we define three knowledge sources (KSs) for PPA resolution: surface patterns (taking in account factors such as syntactic parallelism), possessive relationship rules and sentence centering. These knowledge sources are organized in a blackboard architecture for PPA resolution, which provides both knowledge and procedure distribution among autonomous entities (reflexive agents), each of them specialized in a particular aspect of the problem solving. The proposal has been implemented and its results are discussed at the end of the work.