Detecting and Resolving Shell Nouns in German

Adam Roussel


Abstract
This paper describes the design and evaluation of a system for the automatic detection and resolution of shell nouns in German. Shell nouns are general nouns, such as fact, question, or problem, whose full interpretation relies on a content phrase located elsewhere in a text, which these nouns simultaneously serve to characterize and encapsulate. To accomplish this, the system uses a series of lexico-syntactic patterns in order to extract shell noun candidates and their content in parallel. Each pattern has its own classifier, which makes the final decision as to whether or not a link is to be established and the shell noun resolved. Overall, about 26.2% of the annotated shell noun instances were correctly identified by the system, and of these cases, about 72.5% are assigned the correct content phrase. Though it remains difficult to identify shell noun instances reliably (recall is accordingly low in this regard), this system usually assigns the right content to correctly classified cases. cases.
Anthology ID:
W18-0707
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Massimo Poesio, Vincent Ng, Maciej Ogrodniczuk
Venue:
CRAC
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
61–67
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0707
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-0707
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Adam Roussel. 2018. Detecting and Resolving Shell Nouns in German. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference, pages 61–67, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting and Resolving Shell Nouns in German (Roussel, CRAC 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0707.pdf