An investigation of broad coverage automatic pronoun resolution for information retrieval

Abstract

Term weighting methods have been shown to give significant increases in information retrieval performance. The presence of pronomial references in documents reduces the term frequencies of associated words with a consequent effect on term weights and information retrieval behaviour. This investigation explores the impact on information retrieval performance of broad coverage automatic pronoun resolution. Results indicate that this approach has potential to improve both precision at fixed cutoff levels and average precision.