Bridging Resolution: Making Sense of the State of the Art
Summary
Bridging resolution means linking an anaphor to a related but non-identical antecedent, as in "the games" linked to "baseball." Yu and Poesio's (2020) neural multi-task learning (MTL) model, trained jointly on coreference and bridging, is the current state of the art. It was unclear why it beats rule-based systems and where it still fails. Kobayashi and Ng build a sieve-style hybrid. First, the hand-crafted rules (Hou's rules for ISNotes, Rösiger's rulesets for BASHI and ARRAU) propose links. The MTL model then handles the remaining mentions. They evaluate full bridging resolution with gold mentions on ISNotes, BASHI and ARRAU RST. The hybrid has much higher recall than either component and achieves the best F-scores on all three corpora. This shows that the rules and MTL make complementary errors, so they should be combined rather than treated as rivals. A manual error analysis identifies the main weaknesses of MTL. The authors also suggest that the annotation quality of BASHI may need to be re-examined.
Key points
- Data:
- ISNotes: 50 WSJ docs, 663 anaphors.
- BASHI: 50 WSJ docs, 459 anaphors.
- ARRAU RST: 413 docs, 3777 anaphors, standard train-test split.
- ISNotes and BASHI use 10-fold cross-validation.
- F-scores (recognition / resolution), Hybrid vs MTL:
- ISNotes: 49.5 / 30.0 vs 43.8 / 25.2.
- BASHI: 40.5 / 20.1 vs 35.1 / 18.1.
- ARRAU RST: 37.4 / 25.4 vs 36.7 / 24.0. The gain is small here because the rules' precision is no better than MTL's.
- Rules vs MTL on ISNotes: the rules win on most rule categories, but MTL wins on the large leftover "Other" category.
- Main MTL error types:
- Recognition precision: coreferent mentions mislabelled as bridging, 14–30% of these errors.
- Recognition recall: indefinite anaphors confused with NEW mentions, 48–71% of these errors.
- Resolution precision: short mentions without modifiers, 23–63% of these errors.
- BASHI anomalies: documents are longer than in ISNotes (1154 vs 805 tokens/doc), and the authors show examples of bridging links that were not annotated.
Cited by
- The CODI-CRAC 2022 Shared Task on Anaphora, Bridging, and Discourse Deixis in Dialogue
- The Universal Anaphora Scorer
- The Universal Anaphora Scorer 2.0
Cite
@inproceedings{kobayashi2021bridging,
title = {{Bridging Resolution: Making Sense of the State of the Art}},
author = {Kobayashi, Hideo and Ng, Vincent},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies},
year = {2021},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.131},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.131}
}References
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