Can Anaphoric Definite Descriptions be Replaced by Pronouns?

Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004)

Abstract

We investigate the hypothesis that a pronoun is used in discourse, when its antecedent is in the focus of the discourse. We create a corpus of `replaced anaphoric definite descriptions', where occurrences of definite descriptions are replaced with a corresponding pronoun. We use the (Lappin, 1994) anaphora resolution algorithm on the new corpus, and obtain a much lower performance than when the corpus only contains genuine pronouns, thus supporting the hypothesis.