What kinds of errors do reference resolution models make and what can we learn from them?

Jorge Sánchez, Mauricio Mazuecos, Hernán Maina, Luciana Benotti


Abstract
Referring resolution is the task of identifying the referent of a natural language expression, for example “the woman behind the other woman getting a massage”. In this paper we investigate which are the kinds of referring expressions on which current transformer based models fail. Motivated by this analysis we identify the weakening of the spatial natural constraints as one of its causes and propose a model that aims to restore it. We evaluate our proposed model on different datasets for the task showing improved performance on the most challenging kinds of referring expressions. Finally we present a thorough analysis of the kinds errors that are improved by the new model and those that are not and remain future challenges for the task.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-naacl.152
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1971–1986
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.152
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.152
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jorge Sánchez, Mauricio Mazuecos, Hernán Maina, and Luciana Benotti. 2022. What kinds of errors do reference resolution models make and what can we learn from them?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022, pages 1971–1986, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What kinds of errors do reference resolution models make and what can we learn from them? (Sánchez et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.152.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.152.mp4
Data
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