Ana Pro, Tool for Identification and Resolution of Direct Anaphora in Spanish

AnaPro is software that solves direct anaphora in Spanish, specifically pronouns: it finds the noun or group of words to which the pronoun refers. It locates in the previous sentences the referent or antecedent which the pronoun replaces. An example of a direct anaphora solved is the pronoun "he" in the sentence "He is sad." Much of the work on anaphora has been done for texts in English; thus, we specifically focus on Spanish documents. AnaPro directly supports text analysis (to understand what a document says), a non trivial task since there are different writing styles, references, idiomatic expressions, etc. The problem grows if the analyzer is a computer, because they lack "common sense" (which persons possess). Hence, before text analysis, its preprocessing is required, in order to assign tags (noun, verb,...) to each word, find the stems, disambiguate nouns, verbs, prepositions, identify colloquial expressions, identify and resolve anaphora, among other chores. AnaPro works for Spanish sentences. It is a novel procedure, since it is automatic (no user intervenes during the resolution) and it does not need dictionaries. It employs heuristics procedures to discover the semantics and help in the decisions; they are rather easy to implement and use limited knowledge. Nevertheless, its results are good (81% of correct answers, at least). However, more tests will give a better idea of its goodness.