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Evaluation Metrics For End-to-End Coreference Resolution Systems

Summary

End-to-end coreference systems must detect mentions automatically, so their output contains "twinless" mentions: system mentions absent from the gold key, and gold mentions the system missed. Standard metrics assume key and response share the same mention set. Researchers have patched them in inconsistent and loosely documented ways, so published scores cannot be compared. Cai and Strube analyse MUC, B3 and CEAF and the existing B3 variants (B3 0 and B3 all from Stoyanov et al. 2009, and B3 r&n from Rahman & Ng 2009). Using small constructed examples, they show these variants are either too lenient or shift with the mention tagger rather than with resolution quality. They propose B3 sys and CEAF sys, which handle twinless mentions differently for precision and for recall. They then test the metrics with the BART reimplementation of Soon et al. (2001), fed by two mention taggers, and compare against Bengtson & Roth (2008). The new variants rank systems consistently with MUC and intuition, giving the field a reproducible basis for comparing end-to-end systems.

Key points

  • How B3 sys treats twinless mentions:
    • Missed gold mentions are inserted into the response as singletons.
    • Spurious system mentions left unresolved are dropped.
    • Spurious system mentions that were wrongly linked are added to the key, so they lower precision.
    • Recall is computed only over the original key chains.
  • Worked example (key {a b c} vs. response {a b d}):
    • B3 0 scores P 1.0 / F 0.615, because it ignores the spurious mention d.
    • B3 sys scores P 0.667 / R 0.556 / F 0.606.
  • Weakness of B3 all: it awards higher precision when a mention tagger merely extracts additional mentions, such as extra singletons, even if the coreference links are identical.
  • Realistic setting (Soon, SM2 tagger vs. SM1 tagger):
    • SM2 is better under B3 sys (F 73.9 vs. 70.8) and under CEAF sys (66.3 vs. 63.7).
    • B3 0 reverses this ranking (68.4 vs. 70.1).
    • CEAF orig gives very low, unstable scores (58.2 vs. 48.5).
  • Code availability: implementations of both metrics, with extended examples, are released open source at h-its.org/nlp/download.

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 · Part-of-speech tagging

Cited by

31 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 13 of them have a page here, 18 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{cai2010evaluation,
  title = {{Evaluation Metrics For End-to-End Coreference Resolution Systems}},
  author = {Cai, Jie and Strube, Michael},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference},
  year = {2010},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W10-4305/}
}

References

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  3. Culotta, Aron, Michael Wick & Andrew McCallum (2007). First-order probabilistic models for coreference resolution. In Proceedings of Human Language Technologies 2007: The Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Rochester, N.Y., 22–27 April 2007, pp.… find our card
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