Incorporating Temporal Coherence to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution

Xinyu Chen, Peifeng Li, Qiaoming Zhu


Abstract
Previous work on cross-document event coreference resolution (CDECR) primarily focused on enhancing semantic coherence between event mentions, largely overlooking the critical aspect of temporal coherence. To address this issue, we propose CohTP, a novel Temporal Cohorence-driven event coreference framework. CohTP explicitly models and enforces temporal constraints by first constructing a temporal event graph via a fine-tuned natural language inference (NLI) model. The graph is then refined using an Edge-Aware GNN to resolve conflicts and partitioned into ordered time segments, where undirected edges group contemporaneous events. Event coreference resolution is subsequently performed within these temporally coherent segments, where event representations are further augmented with temporally consistent contexts. Experiments on the ECB+, GVC, WEC, and ECB+META datasets show that CohTP outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1345
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
29151–29168
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1345/
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Cite (ACL):
Xinyu Chen, Peifeng Li, and Qiaoming Zhu. 2026. Incorporating Temporal Coherence to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 29151–29168, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Incorporating Temporal Coherence to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution (Chen et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1345.pdf
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