A marker-passing algorithm for reference resolution

Reference is an important phenomenon in natural language, and it has been addressed by many researchers. Though a local focus constitutes an important information used in reference resolution, the previous focusing approaches fail to resolve some references due to several problems. The authors present a marker-passing algorithm and some experimental results. Reference resolution is carried out based on the premise that the most active concept which is acceptable syntactically and semantically as a referent is the referent. By defining the activeness of each concept and propagating activeness to related concepts, these problems are avoided. Referability is defined based on constraints and activeness and is used to compute the referent. This model has been implemented on SNAP (Semantic Network Array Processor) simulator, and it shows a 90.2% success rate in various definite references on a set of 100 news articles