The Users Who Say ‘Ni’: Audience Identification in Chinese-language Restaurant Reviews

Abstract

We give an algorithm for disambiguating generic versus referential uses of secondperson pronouns in restaurant reviews in Chinese. Reviews in this domain use the ‘you’ pronoun 你 either generically or to refer to shopkeepers, readers, or for selfreference in reported conversation. We first show that linguistic features of the local context (drawn from prior literature) help in disambigation. We then show that document-level features (n-grams and document-level embeddings)— not previously used in the referentiality literature— actually give the largest gain in performance, and suggest this is because pronouns in this domain exhibit ‘one-senseper-discourse’. Our work highlights an important case of discourse effects on pronoun use, and may suggest practical implications for audience extraction and other sentiment tasks in online reviews.