Anaphoric reference in clinical reports: Characteristics of an annotated corpus

Abstract

Motivation: Expressions that refer to a real-world entity already mentioned in a narrative are often considered anaphoric. For example, in the sentence " The pain comes and goes," the expression " the pain" is probably referring to a previous mention of pain. Interpretation of meaning involves resolving the anaphoric reference: deciding which expression in the text is the correct antecedent of the referring expression, also called an anaphor. We annotated a set of 180 clinical reports (surgical pathology, radiology, discharge summaries, and emergency department) from two institutions to indicate all anaphor-antecedent pairs. Objective: The objective of this study is to describe the character..