Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Pronominalization has been related to the idea of a local focus - a set of discourse entities in the speaker's centre of attention, for example in Gundel et al. (1993)'s givenness hierarchy or in centering theory. Both accounts say that the determination of the focus depends on syntactic as well as pragmatic factors, but have not been able to pin those factors down. In this paper, we uncover the major factors which determine the focus set in descriptive texts. This new focus definition has been evaluated with respect to two corpora: museum exhibit labels, and newspaper articles. It provides an operationalizable basis for pronoun production, and has been implemented as the reusable module gnome-np. The algorithm behind gnome-np is compared with the most recent pronoun generation algorithm of McCoy and Strube (1999).
Henschel et al. (Sat,) studied this question.