Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in K onkani language incorporating Gender Agreement (2024)

Abstract: Konkani is a low-resource language, spoken mainly on the central west coast of India. Approximately 2.3 million people speak Konkani (Office of the Registrar General Census Commissioner, India,2011). It is also the official language of the state of Goa. It belongs to the Southern Indo-Aryan language group. The official Script for writing the Konkani language is Devanagari. Despite this, being a low-resource language has hampered its development on the digital platform, Konkani has yet to significantly impact its digital presence. To improve this situation, contribution to Natural Language Understanding in the Konkani language is important. This paper aims to resolve pronominal anaphora in the Konkani language using a rule-based method incorporating gender agreement. This is required in NLP applications like text summarization, machine translation, and question-answering systems. While research on English and other foreign languages, as well as Indian languages like Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, and Marathi, have been done, no work has been done on the Konkani language thus far. This is the very first attempt made to resolve anaphora in Konkani.

## introduction in linguistics, anaphora resolution is used. it resolves the reference pointing to the earlier entity in the discourse. reference used to point to the entity is called an "anaphor" and the entity pointed by the reference is called an "antecedent". ## literature review anaphora resolution has evolved in the past few decades. many approaches have been used in resolving anaphora like, rule-based, machine learning-based, knowledge-based, and so on. the salience feature-based approach was used by @xcite for the english and german languages. simple noun-based rules and part of speech tagger were used by @xcite . for indian languages, work has been carried out for languages like, hindi, bengali, malayalam, and tamil. researchers have started working recently on the marathi language. for the malayalam and hindi languages, a rule-based approach vasisth was used by @xcite . a hybrid approach for anaphora resolution in hindi using a dependency parser and decision tree classifier was used by @xcite . in 2014, @xcite came up with a generic anaphora resolution engine for indian languages . it used a machine learning approach. in 2015,(jonnalagadda and mamidi, 2015)came up with a rule-based pronominal anaphora resolution for telugu dialogues. in 2019, @xcite came up with a rule-based anaphora resolution for marathi sentences. in 2022, @xcite came up with a rule-based anaphora resolution approach in marathi focusing on binding theory. ## pronominal anaphora resolution in konakni there are different types of pronouns in konkani as follows: in this paper, we are focusing on the demonstrative pronouns and their variations as follows: ## results and discussion the evaluation measure used to test the system is accuracy. accuracy is used to measure the performance of the system in natural language processing. ## conclusion and future work through this work, we have created a rule-based anaphora resolution algorithm incorporating gender agreement for konkani language. anaphora resolution focussed on the demonstrative pronouns and their variations. four cases with different sentence structures were addressed. we also encountered sentence structures having 2 or more common nouns and no proper noun whose anaphora could not be resolved. in the future, we want to design a rule which will address the limitation and also build up our dataset, so that we can test the system in a better way. we also want to address more complex cases of type case 4.