"The police told the demonstrators that, unless, they dispersed peacefully, they would arrest them." How do we understand who the pronouns 'they' and 'them' refer to? And how do we teach computers to solve this kind of problem?
Anaphora Resolution seeks to answer these kind of questions. Teaching computers to solve this kind of problem is one of the major headaches of natural language processing, and there continues to be a large amount of interesting research devoted to the field.
Ruslan Mitkov begins by introducing basic notions and terminology, moving onto early research methods and approaches, recent developments and applications and then future directions.