On Coreferring: Coreference in MUC and Related Annotation Schemes

What it is about

The paper argues that MUC-style "coreference" annotation covers more than the coreference relation (two noun phrases with the same referent). It separates coreference from anaphora (anaphora is irreflexive, non-symmetric and non-transitive, and depends on context; coreference is an equivalence relation), and it shows where the MUC guidelines ask annotators to link things that do not corefer: non-referring NPs in "No solution emerged ... or ... whenever a solution emerged ... we embraced it", bound anaphora such as "Every TV network reported its projects", and predicative NPs such as "a president of the company" linked to the subject. Their proposal is a division of labour: annotate the coreference relation proper in one layer, and bound anaphora and subject-predicate relations in separate layers, and rethink the task before it is extended to speech or to whole/part relations. The paper has no experiment; its argument rests on constructed examples and on the MUC task definition, which lists four priorities (support for the extraction tasks, about 95% inter-annotator agreement, cheap annotation, a corpus usable by outside linguists).

Ideas

• I1. Split the mention-pair labels in coref/src/corefud.rs into three: identity, bound (quantifier antecedent) and predicative (copular) links. Build the split from UD relations (cop, nsubj with a copula, quantifier determiners such as every, each, no), so the rules say why each link is of a type.
• I2. Make the sieve refuse to link a quantifier NP to a pronoun as identity, and log the refusal as a bound-anaphora candidate in coref/src/sieve.rs, instead of counting it as an error.
• I3. Put the paper's four MUC criteria into coref/src/eval.rs as a checklist that a corpus must pass before its scores are used, with agreement measured on a small set of double-annotated sentences.

For Mova

Code: coref/src/sieve.rs (link types), coref/src/corefud.rs (annotation layers), prag (bound and predicative readings for prag/src/frames.rs). Chapter: 35. Reference and coreference, with 23. Complementation for the predicative case. Measure: a test set of 40 constructed sentences (bound, predicative, identity), counted by type, with the sieve output checked by hand; run twice.

Topics: Coreference resolution

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1162/089120100750105966

@article{deemter2000coreferring,
  title = {{On Coreferring: Coreference in MUC and Related Annotation Schemes}},
  author = {Deemter, Kees van and Kibble, Rodger},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2000},
  doi = {10.1162/089120100750105966},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/089120100750105966}
}

References

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