PronounFlow: A Hybrid Approach for Calibrating Pronouns in Sentences
This addresses pronoun ambiguity issues in natural language processing, which can hinder machine comprehension and bias avoidance, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing coreference resolution methods.
The paper tackles the problem of pronoun disambiguation in English text, particularly for unspecified gender cases, by developing PronounFlow, a neural-symbolic system that identifies untied pronouns and suggests alternatives to avoid biases. Experiments show it helps coreference resolution systems with pronoun disambiguation.
Flip through any book or listen to any song lyrics, and you will come across pronouns that, in certain cases, can hinder meaning comprehension, especially for machines. As the role of having cognitive machines becomes pervasive in our lives, numerous systems have been developed to resolve pronouns under various challenges. Commensurate with this, it is believed that having systems able to disambiguate pronouns in sentences will help towards the endowment of machines with commonsense and reasoning abilities like those found in humans. However, one problem these systems face with modern English is the lack of gender pronouns, where people try to alternate by using masculine, feminine, or plural to avoid the whole issue. Since humanity aims to the building of systems in the full-bodied sense we usually reserve for people, what happens when pronouns in written text, like plural or epicene ones, refer to unspecified entities whose gender is not necessarily known? Wouldn't that put extra barriers to existing coreference resolution systems? Towards answering those questions, through the implementation of a neural-symbolic system that utilizes the best of both worlds, we are employing PronounFlow, a system that reads any English sentence with pronouns and entities, identifies which of them are not tied to each other, and makes suggestions on which to use to avoid biases. Undertaken experiments show that PronounFlow not only alternates pronouns in sentences based on the collective human knowledge around us but also considerably helps coreference resolution systems with the pronoun disambiguation process.