Evaluating automated and manual acquisition of anaphora resolution strategies

We describe one approach to build an automatically trainable anaphora resolution system. In this approach, we use Japanese newspaper articles tagged with discourse information as training examples for a machine learning algorithm which employs the C4.5 decision tree algorithm by Quinlan (Quinlan, 1993). Then, we evaluate and compare the results of several variants of the machine learning-based approach with those of our existing anaphora resolution system which uses manually-designed knowledge sources. Finally, we compare our algorithms with existing theories of anaphora, in particular, Japanese zero pronouns.