Using LSA for Pronominal Anaphora Resolution

Until now, the contribution of world knowledge to the process of pronominal anaphora resolution has not received a thorough computational investigation, mostly due to the lack of a large scale implemented model of world knowledge. This paper proposes Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) as such a model: word meaning representation it constructs can be used to rank potential antecedents according to how well they fit in the pronoun's context. The initial results of incorporating LSA into a pronominal anaphora resolution algorithm are encouraging. The importance of world knowledge in pronominal anaphora resolution has been recognized since the early days of computational approaches to the problem. In his groundbreaking paper that proposes a syntax-based resolution algorithm [4], J. Hobbs suggests that his algorithm could be enhanced by adding "simple selectional restrictions, like dates don't move, large fixed objects don't move, etc." However, he does not propose a way to acquire this..