Zero anaphora resolution in Chinese with partial parsing based on centering theory

Most traditional approaches to anaphora resolution are based on the integration of complex syntactic information and domain knowledge. However, to construct a domain knowledge base is very labor-intensive and time-consuming. We work on the output of a part-of-speech tagger and use a partial parsing instead of a complex parsing to resolve zero anaphors in Chinese text. We employ centering theory and constraint rules to identify the antecedents of zero anaphors appeared in the preceding utterances. We focus on the cases of zero anaphors that occur in the topic or subject, and object positions of utterances. The result shows that the precision rates of zero anaphora detection and the recall rate of zero anaphora resolution with the method are 81% and 70% respectively.