An Empirical Study of Centering in Chinese Anaphoric Resolution

We have examined the optimal setting of the basic centering parameters: utterance, ranking, and R1-pronouns. The results reveal that when utterance is defined as shorter chunks of text sequences, zero pronouns can be resolved better. Pronoun resolution is less sensitive to the setting of utterance. Among the ranking-affecting factors, the grammatical roles played by the discourse entities and their syntactic hierarchies have greater bearing on their discourse salience. The pervasive higher precision rate in zero pronoun resolution suggests that zero pronouns are more suitable to be chosen as R1-pronouns when Centering is applied to Chinese anaphora resolution.