Exploiting Cross-Lingual Hints to Discover Event Pronouns

Non-nominal co-reference is much less studied than nominal coreference, partly because of the lack of annotated corpora. We explore the possibility of exploiting parallel multilingual corpora as a means of cheap supervision for the classification of three different readings of the English pronoun it: entity, event or pleonastic, from their translation in several languages. We found that the 'event' reading is not very frequent, but can be easily predicted provided that the construction used to translate the it example is a pronoun as well. These cases, nevertheless, are not enough to generalize to other types of non-nominal reference.