Effects of 'Cf-ranking' on Chinese and English anaphora resolution: A contrastive study

This paper adopts the parametric approach to the Centering Theory and designs 6 algorithms to examine the effects of the different setting of the Centering parameter 'Cf-ranking' on the results of anaphora resolution in Chinese and English. The results show that, overall, 1) in both languages grammatical function is a better indicator of Cf salience than linear order; 2) integrating syntactic parallelism and Cb continuity into grammatical function ranking may have its advantage in ZP and PRON resolution respectively, and the combination of the two gets a wider edge in the resolution of both ZP and PRON in the two languages; and 3) ranking Cfs according to grammatical function and at the same time taking both syntactic parallelism and hierarchical structure into consideration can achieve best results for ZP resolution in both languages and for Chinese pronoun resolution, but may produce a negative effect on English pronoun resolution. Adapted from the source document