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Unsupervised Event Coreference Resolution with Rich Linguistic Features

Summary

Most earlier event coreference systems were supervised pairwise classifiers. They needed costly annotated data, they were tied to one domain or language, and they could not model how events are distributed across a document or topic. Bejan and Harabagiu treat coreference as fully unsupervised clustering and propose two generative nonparametric Bayesian models. The first extends the hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP) so that each event mention can carry many features, not only its word. The second combines an infinite factorial HMM with an infinite HMM (iFHMM-iHMM). This lets it handle an unbounded feature space, choose salient feature values automatically and capture discourse-level ordering. In both models the number of events is left open. Each mention is described by lexical, class (TimeML event class), WordNet and semantic-role features (PropBank and FrameNet, aligned statistically). The authors evaluate within- and cross-document coreference on ACE and on ECB, a newly annotated corpus with documents grouped into topics. Both models clearly beat two baselines. This matters because it shows rich-feature event clustering can work without labeled training data.

Key points

  • Models: two HDP variants (HDP_flat and HDP_struct) whose feature types were tuned by hand, and the iFHMM-iHMM, which selects features automatically. The iFHMM-iHMM's scores mostly fall between those of the two HDP variants. It was tested with four filtering schemes (unfiltered, discrete, median, uniform), and none was clearly better than the others.
  • Features: head word and lemma, neighbouring words and neighbouring event mentions, POS, TimeML event class, WordNet synonym-closure and lexicographer-file clusters, PropBank arguments mapped to FrameNet frame elements, semantic frame, and feature combinations.
  • Feature selection: the iFHMM-iHMM kept at most 1.5% of distinct feature values. Its best results used about 0.05% on ACE (α′ = 10) and 0.91% on ECB (α′ = 150).
  • Sampling vs. using all features: in an experiment on a feature subset, B³ F1 rose from 55.0 to about 80–82 on ACE within-document, from 73.6 to about 89 on ECB within-document, and from 64.5 to about 78–79 on ECB cross-document.
  • Comparison and errors: the closest prior system, the supervised approach of Chen and Ji (2009), reached 92.2% B³ F on ACE, but it used gold event mentions and a hand-tuned threshold. The most common errors involve mentions whose arguments are left implicit, and participants or locations that are linked only by part-of relations.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Coreference resolution · Semantic role labeling

Cited by

91 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 35 of them have a page here, 56 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{bejan2010unsupervised,
  title = {{Unsupervised Event Coreference Resolution with Rich Linguistic Features}},
  author = {Bejan, Cosmin and Harabagiu, Sanda},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2010},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/P10-1143/}
}

References

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