A Brief Survey and Comparative Study of Recent Development of Pronoun Coreference Resolution in English

Hongming Zhang, Xinran Zhao, Yangqiu Song


Abstract
Pronoun Coreference Resolution (PCR) is the task of resolving pronominal expressions to all mentions they refer to. Compared with the general coreference resolution task, the main challenge of PCR is the coreference relation prediction rather than the mention detection. As one important natural language understanding (NLU) component, pronoun resolution is crucial for many downstream tasks and still challenging for existing models, which motivates us to survey existing approaches and think about how to do better. In this survey, we first introduce representative datasets and models for the ordinary pronoun coreference resolution task. Then we focus on recent progress on hard pronoun coreference resolution problems (e.g., Winograd Schema Challenge) to analyze how well current models can understand commonsense. We conduct extensive experiments to show that even though current models are achieving good performance on the standard evaluation set, they are still not ready to be used in real applications (e.g., all SOTA models struggle on correctly resolving pronouns to infrequent objects). All experiment codes will be available upon acceptance.
Anthology ID:
2021.crac-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Sameer Pradhan, Massimo Poesio, Yulia Grishina, Vincent Ng
Venue:
CRAC
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–11
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.crac-1.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.crac-1.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hongming Zhang, Xinran Zhao, and Yangqiu Song. 2021. A Brief Survey and Comparative Study of Recent Development of Pronoun Coreference Resolution in English. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference, pages 1–11, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Brief Survey and Comparative Study of Recent Development of Pronoun Coreference Resolution in English (Zhang et al., CRAC 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.crac-1.1.pdf
Software:
 2021.crac-1.1.Software.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.crac-1.1.mp4
Data
Definite Pronoun Resolution DatasetWSCWinoGrande