Malay Anaphor and Antecedent Candidate Identification: A Proposed Solution

This paper discusses on Malay language anaphor and antecedent candidate determination using the knowledge-poor techniques. The process to determine the candidate for anaphor and antecedent is important because the usage of pronouns in a text is not always considered as an anaphor. Sometimes pronoun referred to something outside the context or does not refer to any situation in the text. Such a situation is also exhibited in the use of pronouns in Malay language. Therefore, certain rules must be issued to identify the antecedent and anaphor candidate. Pronoun usage in Malay language does indicate the gender of the person, but to distinguish the status of the person such as imperial family, honorable people and common people. Thus, generic rules that have been used by other languages cannot simply be adapted for Malay language. The proposed solution concerns with the distance of each candidate and location of the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) used to determine the anaphor candidate. As such, syntactic information, semantic information and distance of anaphor-antecedent are seen important to determine the antecedent candidate.