@inproceedings{le-titov-2017-optimizing,
    title = "Optimizing Differentiable Relaxations of Coreference Evaluation Metrics",
    author = "Le, Phong  and
      Titov, Ivan",
    editor = "Levy, Roger  and
      Specia, Lucia",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning ({C}o{NLL} 2017)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Vancouver, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/K17-1039/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/K17-1039",
    pages = "390--399",
    abstract = "Coreference evaluation metrics are hard to optimize directly as they are non-differentiable functions, not easily decomposable into elementary decisions. Consequently, most approaches optimize objectives only indirectly related to the end goal, resulting in suboptimal performance. Instead, we propose a differentiable relaxation that lends itself to gradient-based optimisation, thus bypassing the need for reinforcement learning or heuristic modification of cross-entropy. We show that by modifying the training objective of a competitive neural coreference system, we obtain a substantial gain in performance. This suggests that our approach can be regarded as a viable alternative to using reinforcement learning or more computationally expensive imitation learning."
}