Exploiting Cross-Lingual Hints to Discover Event Pronouns

Abstract

Non-nominal co-reference is much less studied than nominal coreference, partly because of the lack of annotated corpora. We explore the possibility to exploit parallel multilingual corpora as a means of cheap supervision for the classification of three different readings of the English pronoun `it': entity, event or pleonastic, from their translation in several languages. We found that the `event' reading is not very frequent, but can be easily predicted provided that the construction used to translate the `it' example is a pronoun as well. These cases, nevertheless, are not enough to generalize to other types of non-nominal reference.

Tasks

Reproductions