Resolving Abstract Definite Anaphora in Chinese Texts

Anaphora is a rhetorical device commonly used in written texts. It denotes the use of terms referring to previously-mentioned entities, concepts, or events. In this paper, the definite anaphora in Chinese texts is addressed and empirical approaches to tackle abstract anaphors are presented. The resolution is built on the association between target anaphors and the corresponding referents in their multiple-type features extracted from different levels of discourse units. Experimental results show that features extracted from clauses are more useful than those extracted from sentences in referent identification. Besides, the presented salience-based model outperforms the SVM-based model no matter whether the best set of extracted features is employed or not.