Cross-lingual Incongruences in the Annotation of Coreference

In the present paper, we deal with incongruences in English-German multilingual coreference annotation and present automated methods to discover them. More specifically, we automatically detect full coreference chains in parallel texts and analyse discrepancies in their annotations. In doing so, we wish to find out whether the discrepancies rather derive from language typological constraints, from the translation or the actual annotation process. The results of our study contribute to the referential analysis of similarities and differences across languages and support evaluation of cross-lingual coreference annotation. They are also useful for cross-lingual coreference resolution systems and contrastive linguistic studies

Parallel Data Helps Neural Entity Coreference Resolution

Coreference resolution is the task of finding expressions that refer to the same entity in a text. Coreference models are generally trained on monolingual annotated data but annotating coreference is expensive and challenging. Hardmeier et al.(2013) have shown that parallel data contains latent anaphoric knowledge, but it has not been explored in end-to-end neural models yet. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective model to exploit coreference knowledge from parallel data. In addition to the conventional modules learning coreference from annotations, we introduce an unsupervised module to capture cross-lingual coreference knowledge. Our proposed cross-lingual model achieves consistent improvements, up to 1.74 percentage points, on the OntoNotes 5.0 English dataset using 9 different synthetic parallel datasets. These experimental results confirm that parallel data can provide additional coreference knowledge which is beneficial to coreference resolution tasks.Comment: camera-ready version; to appear in the Findings of ACL 202

Cross-lingual Incongruences in the Annotation of Coreference

In the present paper, we deal with incongruences in English-German multilingual coreference annotation and present automated methods to discover them. More specifically, we automatically detect full coreference chains in parallel texts and analyse discrepancies in their annotations. In doing so, we wish to find out whether the discrepancies rather derive from language typological constraints, from the translation or the actual annotation process. The results of our study contribute to the referential analysis of similarities and differences across languages and support evaluation of cross-lingual coreference annotation. They are also useful for cross-lingual coreference resolution systems and contrastive linguistic studies

ParCorFull: a Parallel Corpus Annotated with Full Coreference

ParCorFull is a parallel corpus annotated with full coreference chains that has been created to address an important problem that machine translation and other multilingual natural language processing (NLP) technologies face -- translation of coreference across languages. Our corpus contains parallel texts for the language pair English-German, two major European languages. Despite being typologically very close, these languages still have systemic differences in the realisation of coreference, and thus pose problems for multilingual coreference resolution and machine translation. Our parallel corpus covers the genres of planned speech (public lectures) and newswire. It is richly annotated for coreference in both languages, including annotation of both nominal coreference and reference to antecedents expressed as clauses, sentences and verb phrases. This resource supports research in the areas of natural language processing, contrastive linguistics and translation studies on the mechanisms involved in coreference translation in order to develop a better understanding of the phenomenon

ELECTRA for Neural Coreference Resolution in Italian

In recent years, the impact of Neural Language Models has changed every field of Natural Language Processing. In this scenario, coreference resolution has been among the least considered task, especially in language other than English. This work proposes a coreference resolution system for Italian, based on a neural end-to-end architecture integrating ELECTRA language model and trained on OntoCorefIT, a novel Italian dataset built starting from OntoNotes. Even if some approaches for Italian have been proposed in the last decade, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first neural coreference resolver aimed specifically to Italian. The performance of the system is evaluated with respect to three different metrics and also assessed by replacing ELECTRA with the widely-used BERT language model, since its usage has proven to be effective in the coreference resolution task in English. A qualitative analysis has also been conducted, showing how different grammatical categories affect performance in an inflectional and morphological-rich language like Italian. The overall results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed solution, providing a baseline for future developments of this line of research in Italian

A Survey on Semantic Processing Techniques

Semantic processing is a fundamental research domain in computational linguistics. In the era of powerful pre-trained language models and large language models, the advancement of research in this domain appears to be decelerating. However, the study of semantics is multi-dimensional in linguistics. The research depth and breadth of computational semantic processing can be largely improved with new technologies. In this survey, we analyzed five semantic processing tasks, e.g., word sense disambiguation, anaphora resolution, named entity recognition, concept extraction, and subjectivity detection. We study relevant theoretical research in these fields, advanced methods, and downstream applications. We connect the surveyed tasks with downstream applications because this may inspire future scholars to fuse these low-level semantic processing tasks with high-level natural language processing tasks. The review of theoretical research may also inspire new tasks and technologies in the semantic processing domain. Finally, we compare the different semantic processing techniques and summarize their technical trends, application trends, and future directions.Comment: Published at Information Fusion, Volume 101, 2024, 101988, ISSN 1566-2535. The equal contribution mark is missed in the published version due to the publication policies. Please contact Prof. Erik Cambria for detail

Resolving pronominal anaphora using commonsense knowledge

Coreference resolution is the task of resolving all expressions in a text that refer to the same entity. Such expressions are often used in writing and speech as shortcuts to avoid repetition. The most frequent form of coreference is the anaphor. To resolve anaphora not only grammatical and syntactical strategies are required, but also semantic approaches should be taken into consideration. This dissertation presents a framework for automatically resolving pronominal anaphora by integrating recent findings from the field of linguistics with new semantic features. Commonsense knowledge is the routine knowledge people have of the everyday world. Because such knowledge is widely used it is frequently omitted from social communications such as texts. It is understandable that without this knowledge computers will have difficulty making sense of textual information. In this dissertation a new set of computational and linguistic features are used in a supervised learning approach to resolve the pronominal anaphora in document. Commonsense knowledge sources such as ConceptNet and WordNet are used and similarity measures are extracted to uncover the elaborative information embedded in the words that can help in the process of anaphora resolution. The anaphoric system is tested on 350 Wall Street Journal articles from the BBN corpus. When compared with other systems available such as BART (Versley et al. 2008) and Charniak and Elsner 2009, our system performed better and also resolved a much wider range of anaphora. We were able to achieve a 92% F-measure on the BBN corpus and an average of 85% F-measure when tested on other genres of documents such as children stories and short stories selected from the web