Natural language understanding by automatic tools is the vital requirement for document processing tools. To achieve it, automatic system has to understand the coherence in the text. Co-reference chains bring coherence to the text. The commonly occurring reference markers which bring cohesiveness are Pronominal, Reflexives, Reciprocals, Distributives, One-anaphors, Noun–noun reference. Here in this paper, we deal with noun-noun reference in Tamil. We present the methodology to resolve these noun-noun anaphors and also present the challenges in handling the noun-noun anaphoric relations in Tamil.

This paper deals with the various features used for the identification of named entities. The performance of the machine learning system heavily depends on the feature selection criteria. The intention to trace the essential features required for the development of named entity system across languages motivated us to conduct this study. The linguistic analysis was done to find out the part of speech patterns surrounding the context of named entities and from the observation linguistic oriented features are identified for both Indian and European languages. The Indian languages belongs to Dravidian language family such as Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Indo-Aryan language family such as Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali and Marathi, European languages such as English, Spanish, Dutch, German and Hungarian are used in this work. The machine learning technique CRFs was used for the system development. The experiments were conducted using the linguistic features and the results obtained for each languages are comparable with state-of-art systems.

In this paper we give in detail how a resource rich language can be used for resolving pronouns for a less resource language. The source language, which is resource rich language in this study, is Tamil and the resource poor language is Malayalam, both belonging to the same language family, Dravidian. The Pronominal resolution developed for Tamil uses CRFs. Our approach is to leverage the Tamil language model to test Malayalam data and the processing required for Malayalam data is detailed. The similarity at the syntactic level between the languages is exploited in identifying the features for developing the Tamil language model. The word form or the lexical item is not considered as a feature for training the CRFs. Evaluation on Malayalam Wikipedia data shows that our approach is correct and the results, though not as good as Tamil, but comparable.

This paper describes a Natural language processing system developed for automatic identification of explicit connectives, its sense and arguments. Prior work has shown that the difference in usage of connectives across corpora affects the cross domain connective identification task negatively. Hence the development of domain specific discourse parser has become indispensable. Here, we present a corpus annotated with discourse relations on Medline abstracts. Kappa score is calculated to check the annotation quality of our corpus. The previous works on discourse analysis in bio-medical data have concentrated only on the identification of connectives and hence we have developed an end-end parser for connective and argument identification using Conditional Random Fields algorithm. The type and sub-type of the connective sense is also identified. The results obtained are encouraging.