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Zero-subject Resolution Using Linguistic Constraints and Defaults: The Case of Japanese Instruction Manuals

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Abstract

This paper proposes a methodfor anaphora resolution ofzero subjects in Japaneseinstruction manuals based onboth the linguistic nature ofexpressions and the generalontology of the text type.In instruction manuals writtenin Japanese, zero subject isone of main reasons forambiguity of sentences.In order to resolve them,we examined the property ofseveral types of expressionsincluding some forms of verbalphrases and some conjunctive clauses.As a result, we have aset of constraints and defaultsfor zero subject resolution.We verified the precision and recall rateof the constraints and defaults with realexamples, and have found that they makequite good estimates with 97% precisionand 80% recall.

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Mori, T., Matsuo, M. & Nakawaga, H. Zero-subject Resolution Using Linguistic Constraints and Defaults: The Case of Japanese Instruction Manuals. Machine Translation 14, 231–245 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011140916276

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011140916276

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