# PronounFlow: A Hybrid Approach for Calibrating Pronouns in Sentences

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.15235 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15235/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [A Simple Method for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02847/) (2018)
- [WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10641/) (2019)
- [Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00118/) (2023)
- [Welcome to the Modern World of Pronouns: Identity-Inclusive Natural Language Processing beyond Gender](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11923/) (2022)
- [Neural Machine Translation Doesn't Translate Gender Coreference Right Unless You Make It](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05332/) (2020)
- [Back to Square One: Artifact Detection, Training and Commonsense Disentanglement in the Winograd Schema](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08161/) (2021)
- [A Surprisingly Robust Trick for Winograd Schema Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06290/) (2019)
- [The Defeat of the Winograd Schema Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02387/) (2022)
- [How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10281/) (2022)
- [Attention Is (not) All You Need for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13497/) (2019)
- [A Knowledge Hunting Framework for Common Sense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01375/) (2018)
- [A Hybrid Neural Network Model for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11983/) (2019)
- [Tackling Domain-Specific Winograd Schemas with Knowledge-Based Reasoning and Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12081/) (2020)
- [A Neural-Symbolic Approach Towards Identifying Grammatically Correct Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08036/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Flip through any book or listen to any song lyrics, and you will come across pronouns that, in certain cases, can hinder meaning comprehension, especially for machines. As the role of having cognitive machines becomes pervasive in our lives, numerous systems have been developed to resolve pronouns under various challenges. Commensurate with this, it is believed that having systems able to disambiguate pronouns in sentences will help towards the endowment of machines with commonsense and reasoning abilities like those found in humans. However, one problem these systems face with modern English is the lack of gender pronouns, where people try to alternate by using masculine, feminine, or plural to avoid the whole issue. Since humanity aims to the building of systems in the full-bodied sense we usually reserve for people, what happens when pronouns in written text, like plural or epicene ones, refer to unspecified entities whose gender is not necessarily known? Wouldn't that put extra barriers to existing coreference resolution systems? Towards answering those questions, through the implementation of a neural-symbolic system that utilizes the best of both worlds, we are employing PronounFlow, a system that reads any English sentence with pronouns and entities, identifies which of them are not tied to each other, and makes suggestions on which to use to avoid biases. Undertaken experiments show that PronounFlow not only alternates pronouns in sentences based on the collective human knowledge around us but also considerably helps coreference resolution systems with the pronoun disambiguation process.