Nowhere is the problem more apparent than in the interpretation of pronouns. Pronouns are tiny empty vessels whose meaning must be filled in by their surroundings. Automated techniques to understand pronouns have traditionally calculated a pronoun's meaning by finding the noun phrase that is its antecedent. Such techniques cannot find a meaning for pronouns with more complex meanings, such as:
I am defending soon. _That_ makes me very happy.
In spoken discourse, around 50% of the pronouns are of this type---being used to re-mention a concept that was not introduced as a noun phrase. This talk will describe a technique to interpret a broad range of these more complex pronouns. The technique has been implemented within the TRIPS spoken dialog system, and results in an approximate doubling of the number of pronouns interpreted correctly by the system.