WordNet is an on-line lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current

this dissertation. I single out for special thanks first a few of the Ventura Hall crowd, including Mfirvet Eng, Nancy Wiegand, Susan Stucky (the other Mennonite formal linguist), and Kathie Carpenter, Suzanne Kemmer and Michael Barlow, with whom I have happily shared every step of the Stanford graduate pilgrimage. Next, I warmly thank Gina Wein for her competent administrative support and for her friendship. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the strong shaping influences of the members of the Stanford linguistics faculty, who teach and also model a vibrant and professional approach to linguistic research. Representative of these scholars are the three members of my reading committee, whose work and counsel have had a profound effect on my work; I thank Joan Bresnan, Ivan Sag, and my principal advisor, Thomas Wasow, whose patience, cheerful persistence, unstinting support, solid critique, creative ideas, and common sense made the writing of this thesis possible and enjoyable. Every student should have such an advisor

We present an approach to anaphora resolution based on a focusing algorithm, and implemented within an existing MUC (Message Understand-ing Conference) Information Extraction system, allowing quantitative evaluation against a sub-stantial corpus of annotated real-world texts. Extensions to the basic focusing mechanism can be easily tested, resulting in refinements to the mechanism and resolution rules. Results show that the focusing algorithm is highly sensitive to the quality of syntactic-semantic analyses, when compared to a simpler heuristic-based ap-proach. 1

We propose an algorithm to resolve anaphors, tackling mainly the problem of intrasentential antecedents. We base our methodology on the fact that such antecedents are likely to occur in embedded sentences. Sidner's focusing mechanism is used as the basic algorithm in a more complete approach. The proposed algorithm has been tested and implemented as a part of a conceptual analyser, mainly to process pronouns. Details of an evaluation are given.

this paper we present results about an evaluation of both approaches on real-world texts to determine the main drawbacks and advantages of each. We see this as a first step towards answering the question: does adding a notion of focus to a simple coreference mechanism buy you anything? 2 Coreference in LaSIE

We present in this paper the coreference mechanism implemented in the M-LaSIE system, a prototype multilingual Information Extraction (IE) system. We describe an experiment in which texts from a parallel French/English corpus were marked up manually and processed by the system following the MUC coreference annotation scheme. This experiment allows us to assess the applicability of the MUC annotation scheme to a non-English language, to make several observations about differences in coreference behaviour in English and French, and to assess in a tentative way the cross-language portability of the M-LaSIE approach to coreference resolution.

comments on several versions of this paper. Remaining errors and omissions are my own. 1 1

Using the semantics of prepositions for ontology learning Master thesis of Vincent Jacobs

We propose an algorithm to resolve anaphors, tackling mainly the problem of intrasentential antecedents. We base our methodology on the fact that such antecedents are likely to occur in embedded sentences. Sidner's focusing mechanism is used as the basic algorithm in a more complete approach. The proposed algorithm has been tested and implemented as a part of a conceptual analyser, mainly to process pronouns. Details of an evaluation are given. 1 Introduction Intrasentential antecedents, i.e., antecedents occurring in the same sentence as the anaphor, are a crucial issue for the anaphora resolution method. The main problem is to determine the constraints that intrasentential phrases must respect in anaphoric relations. These constraints are used to determine relations between a given anaphor and its antecedents. Until now, this kind of constraint has been tackled mainly in terms of syntactic aspects, see (Lappin and Leass, 1994) (Merlo, 1993) and (Hobbs, 1985). We propose ...

This document, as with all EAGLES documents, is the result of cooperative work involving a number of individuals, contributing in different ways. 1.1 Authors