ANAPHORA RESOLUTION: THE STATE OF THE ART

The "pointing back" (reference) is called an anaphor and the entity to which it refers is its antecedent. The process of determining the antecedent of an anaphor is called anaphora resolution. Usually, both the antecedent and the anaphor are used as referring expressions and having the same referent2 in the real world, they are termed coreferential.

Example (Huddleston 1984):

The Empress hasn't arrived yet but she should be here any minute

In this example, the pronoun "she" is the anaphor (for classification of anaphors, see below) and "the Empress" is the antecedent. Please note that the antecedent is not the noun "Empress" but the noun phrase "the Empress".