Maverick: Efficient and Accurate Coreference Resolution Defying Recent Trends

Giuliano Martinelli, Edoardo Barba, Roberto Navigli


Abstract
Large autoregressive generative models have emerged as the cornerstone for achieving the highest performance across several Natural Language Processing tasks. However, the urge to attain superior results has, at times, led to the premature replacement of carefully designed task-specific approaches without exhaustive experimentation. The Coreference Resolution task is no exception; all recent state-of-the-art solutions adopt large generative autoregressive models that outperform encoder-based discriminative systems. In this work, we challenge this recent trend by introducing Maverick, a carefully designed – yet simple – pipeline, which enables running a state-of-the-art Coreference Resolution system within the constraints of an academic budget, outperforming models with up to 13 billion parameters with as few as 500 million parameters. Maverick achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CoNLL-2012 benchmark, training with up to 0.006x the memory resources and obtaining a 170x faster inference compared to previous state-of-the-art systems. We extensively validate the robustness of the Maverick framework with an array of diverse experiments, reporting improvements over prior systems in data-scarce, long-document, and out-of-domain settings. We release our code and models for research purposes at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/maverick-coref.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.722
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13380–13394
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.722
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Giuliano Martinelli, Edoardo Barba, and Roberto Navigli. 2024. Maverick: Efficient and Accurate Coreference Resolution Defying Recent Trends. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13380–13394, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Maverick: Efficient and Accurate Coreference Resolution Defying Recent Trends (Martinelli et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.722.pdf