Pleonastic-It Project

"It" is one of the hardest pronouns to coreference since many times it can appear in a sentence without an antecedent. This is called "dummy it" or more properly, pleonastic it. The goal of this project is to identify instances of pleonastic it while maintaining a high level of recall, precision, and accuracy. Pleonastic instances can be grouped together into four categories: extraposition, cleft, atmospheric, and miscellaneous. Extraposition is the offset of the subject of a sentence; in this specific instance, the placeholder for the subject is it. Cleft is a sentence with two clauses, one independent one dependent, each with its own verb; in this instance, the subject of the independent clause is "it". Atmospheric refers to sentences which describe an event, time, distance, or weather using "it" as the subject. Miscellaneous mostly refers to idiomatic instances that use it as a subject.