Computational Models of Anaphora

Abstract

Interpreting anaphoric references is a fundamental aspect of our language competence that has long attracted the attention of computational linguists. The appearance of ever-larger anaphorically annotated data sets covering more and more anaphoric phenomena in ever-greater detail has spurred the development of increasingly more sophisticated computational models; as a result, the most recent state-of-the-art neural models are able to achieve impressive performance by leveraging linguistic, lexical, discourse, and encyclopedic information. This article provides a thorough survey of anaphora resolution (coreference) throughout this development, reviewing the available data sets and covering both the preneural history of the field and—in more detail—current neural models, including research on less-studied aspects of anaphoric interpretation such as bridging reference resolution and discourse deixis interpretation. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 9 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.