Coreference Chains in Czech, English and Russian: Preliminary Findings.

This paper is a pilot comparative study on coreference chaining in three languages, namely, Czech, English and Russian. We have analyzed 16 parallel English-Czech newspaper texts and 16 texts in Russian (similar to the English-Czech ones in length and topics). Our motivation was to find out what the linguistic structure of coreference chains in different languages is and what types of distinctions we should take into account for advancing the development of systems for coreference resolution. Taking into account theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of coreference we based our research on the following assumption: the recognition of coreference links for different structural types of noun phrases is regulated by different language mechanisms. The other starting point was that different languages allow pronominal chaining of different length and that coreference chains properties differ for the languages with different strategies for zero anaphora and different systems for definiteness marking. This work reports our first findings within the task of the structural NP types’ distribution comparison in three languages under analysis.