A Flexible Architecture for Reference Resolution

This paper describes a flexible architecture for testing anaphora resolution techniques. Systems which conform to these architectural guidelines are well-encapsulated and portable, and can be used to compare anaphora resolution techniques for new language understanding applications. The architecture was implemented in a pronoun resolution testbed system which accepts two very different input sources: full syntactic parses of unconstrained news text and incomplete parses of spoken dialogs in a constrained domain. 1 Introduction When building natural language understanding systems, choosing the best technique for anaphora resolution is a challenging task. The system builder must decide whether to adopt an existing technique or whether to design a new approach. Many different techniques are described in the literature, many of them claiming high success rates (cf. Hobbs, 1986; Strube, 1998; Mitkov, 1998). Each technique makes different assumptions about the data available to reference res..