# Exophoric Pronoun Resolution in Dialogues with Topic Regularization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.04787 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04787/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [Visual Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08669/) (2016)
- [Higher-order Coreference Resolution with Coarse-to-fine Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05392/) (2018)
- [BERT for Coreference Resolution: Baselines and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09091/) (2019)
- [Quoref: A Reading Comprehension Dataset with Questions Requiring Coreferential Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05803/) (2019)
- [Coreference Resolution as Query-based Span Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01746/) (2019)
- [Visual Coreference Resolution in Visual Dialog using Neural Module Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01816/) (2018)
- [Recursive Visual Attention in Visual Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02664/) (2018)
- [What You See is What You Get: Visual Pronoun Coreference Resolution in Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00421/) (2019)
- [Contextual Neural Machine Translation Improves Translation of Cataphoric Pronouns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09894/) (2020)
- [Incorporating Context and External Knowledge for Pronoun Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10238/) (2019)
- [Joint Coreference Resolution and Character Linking for Multiparty Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11204/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Take That for Me: Multimodal Exophora Resolution with Interactive Questioning for Ambiguous Out-of-View Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16143/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Resolving pronouns to their referents has long been studied as a fundamental natural language understanding problem. Previous works on pronoun coreference resolution (PCR) mostly focus on resolving pronouns to mentions in text while ignoring the exophoric scenario. Exophoric pronouns are common in daily communications, where speakers may directly use pronouns to refer to some objects present in the environment without introducing the objects first. Although such objects are not mentioned in the dialogue text, they can often be disambiguated by the general topics of the dialogue. Motivated by this, we propose to jointly leverage the local context and global topics of dialogues to solve the out-of-text PCR problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of adding topic regularization for resolving exophoric pronouns.