Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in KANTOO English-to-Spanish Machine Translation System

We describe the automatic resolution of pronominal anaphora using KANT Controlled English (KCE) and the KANTOO English-to-Spanish MT system. Our algorithm is based on a robust, syntax-based approach that applies a set of restrictions and preferences to select the correct antecedent. We report a success rate of 89.6 % on a training corpus with 289 anaphors, and 87.5 % on held-out data containing 145 anaphors. Resolution of anaphors is important in translation, due to gender mismatches among languages; our approach translates anaphors to Spanish with 97.2 % accuracy