coreference resolution

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the NLP task of determining which mentions in a text refer to the same real-world entity, clustering all the noun phrases, pronouns, and other referring expressions that denote the same person, place, object, or concept; for example, in the text John said he was tired, coreference resolution must determine that he refers back to John; coreference resolution is essential for deep text understanding, summarisation, information extraction, and reading comprehension, since tracking entities across a long document requires knowing which pronouns and noun phrases co-refer; the task is challenging because reference can be achieved through pronouns, definite descriptions, proper names, and ellipsis, and the mapping between expressions and entities requires world knowledge, syntactic processing, and discourse understanding; modern neural coreference systems using span-based mention scoring and entity-level representations, originally proposed in the e2e-coref system, have substantially advanced performance on benchmark datasets including OntoNotes and CoNLL-2012

Examples

• Coreference resolution is required to answer questions like 'What did the President say?' when 'the President' appears in multiple paragraphs with different pronouns.
• Gendered pronoun coreference resolution has attracted scrutiny for encoding gender biases from training data.