Bootstrapping coreference resolution using word associations
Summary
Most coreference resolution (CoRe) systems need human-annotated training data, so moving them to new domains, genres or languages is costly. Kobdani et al. propose a fully unsupervised alternative. Its central idea is that statistical associations between words, such as Obama and President, signal probable coreference. Such associations are too sparse to learn from small annotated corpora, but large unlabeled text supplies enough evidence.
The authors compute mutual information between markable heads over Wikipedia articles. The A-INF component then clusters markables using these scores together with a few simple hard filters. In the self-training subsystem UNSEL, A-INF's automatic labels become training data for a decision-tree-based supervised learner (SUCRE) that uses a rich feature space. This setup helps both precision and recall.
UNSEL beats earlier unsupervised systems on ACE-2. On SemEval-2010 OntoNotes, it nearly matches its supervised twin, which is trained identically except for using manual labels. This suggests unlabeled data can largely replace annotation.
Key points
-
MCORE is a modular framework with three modes:
- A-INF: unsupervised, association scores only.
- SUCRE: supervised.
- UNSEL: self-trained, with A-INF labeling data for SUCRE.
-
Filters and search: the system uses a small set of filters covering reflexives, pronoun distance, and number/gender agreement. Antecedents are searched within a 10-sentence window, since about 98.68% of antecedents fall inside it.
-
Learning curve: as more Wikipedia articles are used, A-INF's recall rises and its precision falls, but F1 keeps improving up to tens of thousands of articles.
-
SemEval-2010 OntoNotes results (F1):
Setting System MUC B³ CEAF Gold markables UNSEL 63.0 86.9 79.7 Gold markables SUCRE 64.3 87.0 80.1 System markables UNSEL 55.0 69.8 66.3 Both MCORE models outperform Relax, Tanl-1 and SUCRE 2010.
-
ACE-2 vs. OntoNotes gap: UNSEL trails SUCRE clearly on ACE-2. The authors partly attribute this to OntoNotes having more singletons (85.2% vs 60.2%) and a roughly four times larger training set.
Cited by
- Coreference Semantics from Web Features
- Active Learning for Coreference Resolution
- Deterministic Coreference Resolution Based on Entity-Centric, Precision-Ranked Rules
- Solving Hard Coreference Problems
- Translation-Based Projection for Multilingual Coreference Resolution
Cite
@inproceedings{kobdani2011bootstrapping,
title = {{Bootstrapping coreference resolution using word associations}},
author = {Kobdani, Hamidreza and Schuetze, Hinrich and Schiehlen, Michael and Kamp, Hans},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies},
year = {2011},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/P11-1079/}
}References
- Amit Bagga and Breck Baldwin. 1998. Algorithms for scoring coreference chains. In LREC Workshop on Linguistics Coreference ’98, pages 563–566. find our card
- Thomas M. Cover and Joy A. Thomas. 1991. Elements of Information Theory. Wiley. find
- Micha Elsner, Eugene Charniak, and Mark Johnson. 2009. Structured generative models for unsupervised named-entity clustering. In HLT-NAACL ’09, pages 164–172. find
- Jenny Rose Finkel and Christopher D. Manning. 2008. Enforcing transitivity in coreference resolution. In HLT ’08, pages 45–48. find our card
- Aria Haghighi and Dan Klein. 2007. Unsupervised coreference resolution in a nonparametric bayesian model. In ACL ’07, pages 848–855. find our card
- Aria Haghighi and Dan Klein. 2009. Simple coreference resolution with rich syntactic and semantic features. In EMNLP ’09, pages 1152–1161. find our card
- Aria Haghighi and Dan Klein. 2010. Coreference resolution in a modular, entity-centered model. In NAACL-HLT ’10, pages 385–393. find our card
- Andrew Kehler, Douglas E. Appelt, Lara Taylor, and Aleksandr Simma. 2004. Competitive Self-Trained Pronoun Interpretation. In HLT-NAACL ’04, pages 33–36. find
- Manfred Klenner and Étienne Ailloud. 2009. Optimization in coreference resolution is not needed: A nearly-optimal algorithm with intensional constraints. In EACL, pages 442–450. find our card
- Hamidreza Kobdani and Hinrich Schütze. 2010. Sucre: A modular system for coreference resolution. In SemEval ’10, pages 92–95. find our card
- Hamidreza Kobdani, Hinrich Schütze, Andre Burkovski, Wiltrud Kessler, and Gunther Heidemann. 2010. Relational feature engineering of natural language processing. In CIKM ’10. ACM. find
- Xiaoqiang Luo, Abe Ittycheriah, Hongyan Jing, Nanda Kambhatla, and Salim Roukos. 2004. A Mention-Synchronous Coreference Resolution Algorithm Based on the Bell Tree. In ACL ’04, pages 135– 142. find our card
- Xiaoqiang Luo. 2005. On coreference resolution performance metrics. In HLT ’05, pages 25–32. find our card
- A. McEnery, I. Tanaka, and S. Botley. 1997. Corpus annotation and reference resolution. In ANARESOLU-TION ’97, pages 67–74. find
- Alexis Mitchell, Stephanie Strassel, Mark Przybocki, JK Davis, George Doddington, Ralph Grishman, Adam Meyers, Ada Brunstein, Lisa Ferro, and Beth Sundheim. 2003. ACE-2 version 1.0. Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia. find
- Christoph Müller, Stefan Rapp, and Michael Strube. 2002. Applying co-training to reference resolution. In ACL ’02, pages 352–359. find
- Vincent Ng and Claire Cardie. 2003. Bootstrapping coreference classifiers with multiple machine learning algorithms. In EMNLP ’03, pages 113–120. find our card
- Vincent Ng. 2008. Unsupervised models for coreference resolution. In EMNLP ’08, pages 640–649. find our card
- Slav Petrov and Dan Klein. 2007. Improved inference for unlexicalized parsing. In HLT-NAACL ’07, pages 404–411. find
- Simone Paolo Ponzetto. 2010. Knowledge Acquisition from a Collaboratively Generated Encyclopedia, volume 327 of Dissertations in Artificial Intelligence. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: IOS Press & Heidelberg, Germany: AKA Verlag. find
- Hoifung Poon and Pedro Domingos. 2008. Joint unsupervised coreference resolution with markov logic. In EMNLP ’08, pages 650–659. find our card
- Sameer S. Pradhan, Eduard Hovy, Mitch Marcus, Martha Palmer, Lance Ramshaw, and Ralph Weischedel. 2007. Ontonotes: A unified relational semantic representation. In ICSC ’07, pages 517–526. find
- J. Ross Quinlan. 1993. C4.5: Programs for machine learning. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA. find our card
- Karthik Raghunathan, Heeyoung Lee, Sudarshan Rangarajan, Nathanael Chambers, Mihai Surdeanu, Dan Jurafsky, and Christopher Manning. 2010. A multi-pass sieve for coreference resolution. In EMNLP ’10, pages 492–501. find our card
- Marta Recasens, Lluı́s Màrquez, Emili Sapena, M.Antònia Martı́, Mariona Taulé, Véronique Hoste, Massimo Poesio, and Yannick Versley. 2010. SemEval-2010 Task 1: Coreference resolution in multiple languages. In SemEval ’10, pages 70–75. find our card
- Wee Meng Soon, Hwee Tou Ng, and Daniel Chung Yong Lim. 2001. A machine learning approach to coreference resolution of noun phrases. In CL ’01, pages 521–544. find our card
- Veselin Stoyanov, Claire Cardie, Nathan Gilbert, Ellen Riloff, David Buttler, and David Hysom. 2010. Coreference resolution with reconcile. In ACL ’10, pages 156–161. find our card
- Marc Vilain, John Burger, John Aberdeen, Dennis Connolly, and Lynette Hirschman. 1995. A model-theoretic coreference scoring scheme. In MUC6 ’95, pages 45–52. find our card
This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kobdani-2011-bootstrapping-coreference-resolution-word-associations/