An Empirical Study of Zero Anaphora Resolution in Chinese Based on Centering Model

In this paper, we describe the creation of Chinese zero anaphora resolution rules by performing experiments. The rules were constructed based on the centering model. In the experiments, we selected several texts as testing examples. We compared the referents of zero anaphors in the testing texts identified by hand with the ones resolved by using an algorithm employing a resolution rule. Three rules were used to carry out the experiment. The results show that the rule considering grammatical role criteria and domain knowledge obtained the best result: 85% of zero anaphors in the test texts were correctly resolved. We investigate problems of miss-resolution of zero anaphors in the test text and propose solution to deal with them.