Using Automatically Extracted Minimum Spans to Disentangle Coreference Evaluation from Boundary Detection

Nafise Sadat Moosavi, Leo Born, Massimo Poesio, Michael Strube


Abstract
The common practice in coreference resolution is to identify and evaluate the maximum span of mentions. The use of maximum spans tangles coreference evaluation with the challenges of mention boundary detection like prepositional phrase attachment. To address this problem, minimum spans are manually annotated in smaller corpora. However, this additional annotation is costly and therefore, this solution does not scale to large corpora. In this paper, we propose the MINA algorithm for automatically extracting minimum spans to benefit from minimum span evaluation in all corpora. We show that the extracted minimum spans by MINA are consistent with those that are manually annotated by experts. Our experiments show that using minimum spans is in particular important in cross-dataset coreference evaluation, in which detected mention boundaries are noisier due to domain shift. We have integrated MINA into https://github.com/ns-moosavi/coval for reporting standard coreference scores based on both maximum and automatically detected minimum spans.
Anthology ID:
P19-1408
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4168–4178
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1408
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1408
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nafise Sadat Moosavi, Leo Born, Massimo Poesio, and Michael Strube. 2019. Using Automatically Extracted Minimum Spans to Disentangle Coreference Evaluation from Boundary Detection. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 4168–4178, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Using Automatically Extracted Minimum Spans to Disentangle Coreference Evaluation from Boundary Detection (Moosavi et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/starsem-semeval-split/P19-1408.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/385196786
Code
 ns-moosavi/coval
Data
WikiCoref