  This paper proposes a method to analyze Japanese anaphora, in which zero
pronouns (omitted obligatory cases) are used to refer to preceding entities
(antecedents). Unlike the case of general coreference resolution, zero pronouns
have to be detected prior to resolution because they are not expressed in
discourse. Our method integrates two probability parameters to perform zero
pronoun detection and resolution in a single framework. The first parameter
quantifies the degree to which a given case is a zero pronoun. The second
parameter quantifies the degree to which a given entity is the antecedent for a
detected zero pronoun. To compute these parameters efficiently, we use corpora
with/without annotations of anaphoric relations. We show the effectiveness of
our method by way of experiments.
