Linguistically aware evaluation of coreference resolution from the perspective of higher-level applications

Abstract

Coreference resolution is an important part of natural language processing used in machine translation, semantic search, and various other information retrieval and understanding systems. One of the challenges in this field is an evaluation of resolution approaches. There are many different metrics proposed, but most of them rely on certain assumptions, like equivalence between different mentions of the same discourse-world entity, and do not account for overrepresentation of certain types of coreferences present in the evaluation data. In this paper, a new coreference evaluation strategy that focuses on linguistic and semantic information is presented that can address some of these shortcomings. Evaluation model was developed in the broader context of developing coreference resolution capabilities for Lithuanian language; therefore, the experiment was also carried out using Lithuanian language resources, but the proposed evaluation strategy is not language-dependent.