Anaphora for everyone: Pronominal anaphora resolution without a parser

We present an algorithm for anaphora resolution which is a modified and extended version of that developed by Lappin & Leass 1995. In contrast to that work, our algorithm does not require in-depth, full, syntactic parsing of text. Instead, with minimal compromise in output quality, the modifications enable the resolution process to work from the output of a part of speech tagger, enriched only with annotations of grammatical function of lexical items in the input text stream. Evaluation of the results of our implementation demonstrates that accurate anaphora resolution can be realized within natural language processing frameworks which do not--or cannot--employ robust and reliable parsing components.