Interpreting anaphors in natural language text

David Carter9780470210093, 0-470-21009-5

Perhaps the major obstacle to the development of computer programs capable of the sophisticated processing of natural language is the problem of representing and using the large and varied quantities of world or domain knowledge that are, in general, required. This book describes an attempt to circumvent this obstacle for one aspect of the language processing problem – that of inteIpreting anaphors (pronouns and other abbreviated expressions) in texts – by adopting a “shallow processing” approach. In this approach, linguistic knowledge, about syntax, semantics and local focusing, is exploited as heavily as possible, in order to minimise reliance on world knowledge.