Zero-subject Resolution Using Linguistic Constraints and Defaults: The Case of Japanese Instruction Manuals
Machine translation, (1999)Abstract
This paper proposes a method for anaphora resolution of zero subjects in Japanese instruction manuals based on both the linguistic nature of expressions and the general ontology of the text type. In instruction manuals written in Japanese, zero subject is one of main reasons for ambiguity of sentences. In order to resolve them, we examined the property of several types of expressions including some forms of verbal phrases and some conjunctive clauses. As a result, we have a set of constraints and defaults for zero subject resolution. We verified the precision and recall rate of the constraints and defaults with real examples, and have found that they make quite good estimates with 97\% precision and 80\% recall.
