Given the great amount of definite noun phrases that introduce an entity into the text for the first time, this paper presents a set of linguistic features that can be used to detect this type of definites in Spanish. The efficiency of the different features is tested by building a rule-based and a learning-based chain-starting classifier. Results suggest that the classifier, which achieves high precision at the cost of recall, can be incorporated as either a filter or an additional feature within a coreference resolution system to boost its performance. .
