Knowledge-Lean Coreference Resolution and its Relation to Textual Cohesion and Coherence

In this paper we present a new empirical method for coreference resolution, implemented in the COCKTAIL system. The results of COCKTAIL are used for lightweight abduction of cohesion and coherence structures. We show that referential cohesion can be integrated with lexical cohesion to produce pragmatic knowledge. Upon this knowledge coherence abduction takes place. 1 Motivation Coreference evaluation was introduced as a new domain-independent task at the 6th Message Understanding Conference (MUC-6) in 1995. The task focused on a subset of coreference, namely the identity coreference, established between nouns, pronouns and noun phrases (including proper names) that refer to the same entity. In dening the coreference task (cf. (Hirschman and Chinchor, 1997)) special care was taken to use the coreference output not only for supporting Information Extraction(IE), the central task of the MUCs, but also to create means for research on coreference and discourse phenomena independent of IE..