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A Typology of Near-Identity Relations for Coreference (NIDENT)

Summary

Coreference corpora such as ACE and OntoNotes sometimes annotate the same kind of example differently. The authors attribute this to a strict binary choice between identity and non-identity, which fails when two mentions denote almost the same discourse entity. Examples include a town before and after demographic change, a person versus a photo of that person, or "the United States" versus "the White House." The paper treats coreference as a continuum and proposes a middle category, near-identity. This differs from bridging because the relation is still a form of identity. The authors collected problematic cases from real text and built the NIDENT typology from the data upward. It places near-identity in four families: name metonymy, meronymy, class, and spatio-temporal function. They tested the scheme with an inter-annotator agreement study over three rounds, revising the guidelines after each round. Agreement rose to a level the authors consider stable. This establishes the scheme as a basis for larger, consistent corpus annotation and points to a possible individual "coreference bias" in annotators.

Key points

  • NIDENT separates Non-Identity, Identity and Near-Identity. Near-identity covers 15 subtypes, such as Role, Location, Part·Whole, Set·Set, Time and Numerical function.
  • Coreference is defined over discourse entities (mental representations), not real-world referents, so the same pair of names can corefer in one context but not another.
  • Agreement was measured with Kappa. Round 2 (20 texts) reached K = 0.54, or 0.63 and 0.71 after excluding outlier coders.
  • In the final round, K = 0.58 overall. Excluding one outlier gave 0.65, and excluding two gave 0.84.
  • Where two types could co-occur, the guidelines set explicit preferences (e.g., Location metonymy wins over Part·Whole). Overlapping types were merged and vague ones removed.

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

Cited by

24 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 10 of them have a page here, 14 not yet.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{recasens2010typology,
  title = {{A Typology of Near-Identity Relations for Coreference (NIDENT)}},
  author = {Recasens, Marta and Hovy, Eduard and Martí, M. Antònia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)},
  year = {2010},
  doi = {10.63317/4gev5ooze5j9},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4gev5ooze5j9}
}

References

20 references, 5 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  3. George Doddington, Alexis Mitchell, Mark Przybocki, Lance Ramshaw, Stephanie Strassel, and Ralph Weischedel. 2004. The Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) program – tasks, data, and evaluation. In Proceedings of LREC 2004, Lisbon. find our card
  4. Jenny Rose Finkel and Christopher D. Manning. 2008. Enforcing transitivity in coreference resolution. In Proceedings of ACL-HLT 2008, pages 45–48, Columbus, Ohio. find our card
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  6. Matthias Gamer, Jim Lemon, and Ian Fellows, 2009. irr: Various Coefficients of Interrater Reliability and Agreement. R package version 0.82. find
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  10. Olga Krasavina and Christian Chiarcos. 2007. PoCoS – Postdam Coreference Scheme. In Proceedings of the First Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW I), pages 156–163, Prague. find
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  13. Vincent Ng. 2009. Graph-cut-based anaphoricity determination for coreference resolution. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2009, pages 575–583, Boulder, Colorado. find our card
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  15. Massimo Poesio and Ron Artstein. 2008. Anaphoric annotation in the ARRAU corpus. In Proceedings of LREC 2008, Marrakech. find our card
  16. Sameer S. Pradhan, Eduard Hovy, Mitch Marcus, Martha Palmer, Lance Ramshaw, and Ralph Weischedel. 2007. Ontonotes: A unified relational semantic representation. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC-07), pages 517–526, Washington, DC. find
  17. Marta Recasens and M. Antònia Martı́. 2009. AnCora-CO: Coreferentially annotated corpora for Spanish and Catalan. Language Resources and Evaluation, DOI 10.1007/s10579-009-9108-x. — [doi:10.1007/s10579-009-9108-x](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-009-9108-x) find
  18. Marta Recasens, Eduard Hovy, and M. Antònia Martı́, in prep. Identity, non-identity, and near-identity: Addressing the complexity of coreference. find
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