Abstract:As a common phenomenon in Chinese, zero anaphora plays an important role in many natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization and machine reading comprehension. Currently, it has become a research hotspot in the field of natural language processing. Towards better discourse analysis, this study proposes a representation architecture for Chinese zero anaphora from the discourse perspective. Firstly, the elementary discourse unit is taken as the investigation object to determine whether it contains zero elements. Secondly, according to the roles of zero elements in the elementary discourse unit, the zero elements are divided into two categories: the core type and the modifier type. Thirdly, the discourse rhetorical tree of the paragraph is used as the basic unit to evaluate the Chinese zero coreferential relationship. According to the positional relationship between the antecedent and the zero element, the coreferential relationship is classified into two types, i.e., Intra-EDU and Inter-EDU. After that, for Inter-EDU type, the coreferential relationship is furtherly divided into four categories according to the status of the antecedent, i.e., entity, event, union, and others. Finally, this study selects the overlapped 325 texts of the Chinese treebank (CTB), the connective-driven Chinese discourse treebank (CDTB), and the OntoNotes corpus to annotate the Chinese zero anaphora. System evaluation shows the high quality of the constructed corpus for Chinese zero anaphora. Moreover, a complete zero anaphor resolution baseline system is constructed to show the appropriateness and the effectiveness of the proposed representation architecture for Chinese zero anaphora from computability perspective.