Empirical study of Mandarin Chinese discourse analysis: an event-based approach

Discourse analysis plays an important role in natural language understanding. Mandarin Chinese discourse, which has many different properties compared with English discourse, is still far behind in the construction of a basic computational model. We propose an event model to elucidate anaphora and ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese. An event based approach (EBA) based on the model is designed to resolve anaphora and ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese discourse. In this approach, we provide an event based partial parser and an event based reasoning mechanism. This approach is applied to the mathematics word problems of elementary school (MWES). Our results provide empirical evidence that the EBA can resolve many difficult problems in Mandarin Chinese discourse.