Incorporating Structural Information for Better Coreference Resolution

Incorporating Structural Information for Better Coreference Resolution

Fang Kong, Fu Jian

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 5039-5045. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/700

Coreference resolution plays an important role in text understanding. In the literature, various neural approaches have been proposed and achieved considerable success. However, structural information, which has been proven useful in coreference resolution, has been largely ignored in previous neural approaches. In this paper, we focus on effectively incorporating structural information to neural coreference resolution from three aspects. Firstly, nodes in the parse trees are employed as a constraint to filter out impossible text spans (i.e., mention candidates) in reducing the computational complexity. Secondly, contextual information is encoded in the traversal node sequence instead of the word sequence to better capture hierarchical information for text span representation. Lastly, additional structural features (e.g., the path, siblings, degrees, category of the current node) are encoded to enhance the mention representation. Experimentation on the data-set of the CoNLL 2012 Shared Task shows the effectiveness of our proposed approach in incorporating structural information into neural coreference resolution.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Discourse
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Processing