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What is the difference between coreference resolution and anaphora resolution?

Answered 23 February 2015

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The answer by Tim Osborne is very comprehensive and accurate. But perhaps things might be easier when looked at through usage in text linguistics.

Although, co-reference and anaphora can be distinct, they are often used interchangeably by linguists. This is partly because by far the most studied type of anaphoric reference is co-referential. So you could say that co-reference is one of the processes through which anaphora is encoded. It is not just a type of anaphora because co-reference can also be cataphoric (although some people use anaphora to mean reference in both directions).

So the difference between anaphora and correference resolution follows from the above.

© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).