Chinese Overt Pronoun Resolution: A Bilingual Approach

Much research has been done on the problem of English pronoun resolution, but there has been relatively little work on the corresponding problem of Chinese pronoun resolution. While pronoun resolution in both languages remains a challenging task, Chinese pronoun resolution is further complicated by (I) the lack of publicly available Chinese word lists or dictionaries that can be used to look up essential mention attributes such as gender and number; and (2) the relative dearth of Chinese coreference-annotated data. Existing approaches to Chinese pronoun resolution are monolingual, training and testing a pronoun resolver on Chinese data. In contrast, we propose a bilingual approach to Chinese pronoun resolution, aiming to improve the resolution of Chinese pronouns by leveraging the publicly available English dictionaries and coreference annotations. Experiments on the OntoNotes 5.0 corpus demonstrate that our bilingual approach to Chinese pronoun resolution significantly surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art monolingual approaches.