Coreference

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In linguistics, coreference occurs when multiple expressions in a sentence or document have the same referent.

For example, in the sentence "You said you would help me", the two instances of the word you are most likely referring to the same person or group, in which case they are coreferent. Similarly, in "I saw Scott yesterday. He was fishing by the lake," Scott and he are most likely coreferent.

In computational linguistics, coreference resolution is a well-studied problem in discourse.

When the reader must look back to the previous sentence, coreference is called "anaphoric reference". When the reader must look forward, it is termed "cataphoric reference".

See also

• Anaphora (linguistics)
• Generic antecedents
• Disambiguation

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