  This paper describes RESOLVE, a system that uses decision trees to learn how
to classify coreferent phrases in the domain of business joint ventures. An
experiment is presented in which the performance of RESOLVE is compared to the
performance of a manually engineered set of rules for the same task. The
results show that decision trees achieve higher performance than the rules in
two of three evaluation metrics developed for the coreference task. In addition
to achieving better performance than the rules, RESOLVE provides a framework
that facilitates the exploration of the types of knowledge that are useful for
solving the coreference problem.
