“nya” as anaphoric word: A proposed solution

Abstract

This paper not considering how to determine antecedents with its anaphor, but to discuss how to determine the anaphoric word. Anaphoric word determination is important process needs in anaphora resolution. In Malay language there is a word that can be used in three conditions; human referral, other than human referral and not referral word. The word is “nya”. The usage of word “nya” can be trace based on semantic knowledge of word that combines with word “nya”. A novel approach is proposed to identify such uses of “nya”. The propose approach is semantic knowledge that focus on classification of words before “nya”. There are three type of word involve in this determination process. The types are nouns, verb and “kata tugas”. There are classes that have been identified for each type of word. These classes are 16 classes to determine pronoun, six classes for referral word and other than those classes are for not referral word. The experiment has been executed using 60 text news from Berita Harian that consist of 385 word “nya” with 278 “nya” as human referral, 35 “nya” as other than human referral and 72 “nya” not referral word. The result shows that the rules are acceptable. The precision for human referral, other than human referral and non referral word are 0.960, 0.824 and 0.627 respectively. Where else recall for pronoun, referral word, and non-referral word are 0.863, 0.412 and 0.973.