Coreference detection in automatic analysis of specifications

An English language description of a system is typically composed of many English sentences. Consider that each English language sentence is parsed and stored in the form of a conceptual graph that represents the semantics of the sentence. Since each of these conceptual graphs carries information only about the sentence it represents, the set of conceptual graphs must be "joined" logically in order to develop a single conceptual graph that represents the entire system. The process of identifying concept nodes in the conceptual graphs at which joins should be performed is referred to as coreference detection. The authors present a technique to perform coreference detection of object concepts (devices and values).<>