Find a pronoun’s person: search backwards

A pronoun such as he or his can refer to a person mentioned earlier. Our word cards preserve the paragraph’s order with SerialNumber. The task asks about meaning, so the nearest ordinary noun is not enough: “eyes”, “Monday” and “calendar” are nouns but not the person named Swaminathan.

For this small demonstration, we explicitly recognize the person names Swaminathan and Vedanayagam. PartOfSpeech = Noun alone does not tell us which nouns are people. A larger language system would need more information. The nearest-person-name rule produces a candidate; later lessons here show when that rule fails.

The outer loop and the inner loop #

The outer loop reads the paragraph forwards. When a relevant pronoun is found, the inner loop searches earlier words backwards. After finding a candidate, restore the searched cards, return to the marked pronoun and resume the outer loop after it. Without a position marker, you may repeat or skip words.

If the text has p pronouns and each backward scan may inspect up to n words, the search can revisit many cards. Physical restoration adds movements too. The order of a sentence is part of the information: changing it can change the meaning, unlike reordering cards when only their mark sum matters.