SkipCor: skip-mention coreference resolution using linear-chain conditional random fields

PLoS One. 2014 Jun 23;9(6):e100101. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0100101. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Coreference resolution tries to identify all expressions (called mentions) in observed text that refer to the same entity. Beside entity extraction and relation extraction, it represents one of the three complementary tasks in Information Extraction. In this paper we describe a novel coreference resolution system SkipCor that reformulates the problem as a sequence labeling task. None of the existing supervised, unsupervised, pairwise or sequence-based models are similar to our approach, which only uses linear-chain conditional random fields and supports high scalability with fast model training and inference, and a straightforward parallelization. We evaluate the proposed system against the ACE 2004, CoNLL 2012 and SemEval 2010 benchmark datasets. SkipCor clearly outperforms two baseline systems that detect coreferentiality using the same features as SkipCor. The obtained results are at least comparable to the current state-of-the-art in coreference resolution.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Models, Theoretical*

Grants and funding

The work has been supported by the Slovene Research Agency ARRS within the research program P2-0359 and partly financed by the European Union, European Social Fund. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.