We present an automatic approach to determining whether a pronoun in text refers to a preceding noun phrase or is instead nonreferential. We extract the surrounding textual context of the pronoun and gather, from a large corpus, the distribution of words that occur within that context. We learn to reliably classify these distributions as representing either referential or non-referential pronoun instances. Despite its simplicity, experimental results on classifying the English pronoun it show the system achieves the highest performance yet attained on this important task.
REF used n-gram models to identify it as either referential or non-referential.
Distributional Identification of Non-Referential Pronouns
Annual Meeting Of The Association For Computational Linguistics
Computer Science