A Rule-Based Approach to the Identification of Spanish Zero Pronouns

This paper presents a new rule-based method to identify Spanish zero pronouns. The paper describes the comparative evaluation of a baseline method for the identification of zero pronouns with an approach that supplements the baseline by adding a set of restrictions treating impersonal sentences and other zero subject expressions. The identification rules have been tested on a new corpus in which zero pronouns have been manually annotated (the Z-Corpus). The comparative evaluation shows that this rule-based method outperforms the baseline.