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Coreference in English OntoNotes: Properties and Genre Differences

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Text, Speech, and Dialogue (TSD 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11697))

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Abstract

The OntoNotes corpus is widely used for training and testing coreference resolution systems, but only little attention has so far been given to the differences between the different genres of language that the corpus is composed of. We are primarily interested in the contrast between spoken and written language, and thus we conducted in-depth analyses of various reference-related properties of the sub-corpora of OntoNotes, which yield several statistically significant differences. We compare these to predictions made in the Linguistics literature, and draw some conclusions for potential genre-specific implementations of coreference resolution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For the purposes of this paper, we use the term genre in a broad sense of text variety, and text in the sense of “any passage (of language), spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole” [11].

  2. 2.

    We calculated this by taking the average of MUC, BCUBED and CEAF F1 scores in Table 4 in [1] as explained in http://conll.cemantix.org/2011/faq.html and comparing it with the CoNLL value in Table 3 in [6].

  3. 3.

    The closest previous mention of the same referent.

  4. 4.

    The performance rates are calculated with the CONLL scorer as explained in http://conll.cemantix.org/2011/faq.html.

  5. 5.

    ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/treebank/public_html/tokenization.html.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), Projektnummer 317633480, SFB 1287, Project A03. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SFB1287, Research Focus Cognitive Sciences, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Berfin Aktaş, Tatjana Scheffler & Manfred Stede

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  1. Berfin Aktaş
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  2. Tatjana Scheffler
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  3. Manfred Stede
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Correspondence to Berfin Aktaş .

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  1. University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic

    Kamil Ekštein

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Aktaş, B., Scheffler, T., Stede, M. (2019). Coreference in English OntoNotes: Properties and Genre Differences. In: Ekštein, K. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11697. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27947-9_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27947-9_15

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