Pronominal Anaphora Resolution in Konkani language incorporating Gender Agreement

Abstract

Konkani is a low-resource language, spoken mainly on the central west coast of India. Approximately 2.3 million people speak Konkani (Office of the Registrar General Census Commissioner, India, 2011). It is also the official language of the state of Goa. It belongs to the Southern Indo-Aryan language group. The official Script for writing the Konkani language is Devanagari. Despite this, being a low-resource language has hampered its development on the digital platform, Konkani has yet to significantly impact its digital presence. To improve this situation, contribution to Natural Language Understanding in the Konkani language is important. This paper aims to resolve pronominal anaphora in the Konkani language using a rule-based method incorporating gender agreement. This is required in NLP applications like text summarization, machine translation, and question-answering systems. While research on English and other foreign languages, as well as Indian languages like Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, and Marathi, have been done, no work has been done on the Konkani language thus far. This is the very first attempt made to resolve anaphora in Konkani.