This paper proposes a method to resolve intrasentential references of Japanese zero pronouns suitable for application in widely applicable and practical machine translation systems. It is highly effective because the volume of knowledge that must be prepared beforehand is not so large and its accuracy is good. This method focuses on semantic and pragmatic constraints such as conjunctions, verbal semantic attributes and modal expressions to determine intrasentential antecedents of Japanese zero pronouns. According to a window test, intrasentential antecedents could be resolved correctly for 98% of the zero pronouns examined using rules consistent with those for intersentential and extrasentential resolution. 1

This paper proposes a method to extract rules for anaphora resolution of Japanese zero pronouns from aligned sentence pairs.