Major Entity Identification: A Generalizable Alternative to Coreference Resolution

Kawshik Sundar, Shubham Toshniwal, Makarand Tapaswi, Vineet Gandhi


Abstract
The limited generalization of coreference resolution (CR) models has been a major bottleneck in the task’s broad application. Prior work has identified annotation differences, especially for mention detection, as one of the main reasons for the generalization gap and proposed using additional annotated target domain data. Rather than relying on this additional annotation, we propose an alternative referential task, Major Entity Identification (MEI), where we: (a) assume the target entities to be specified in the input, and (b) limit the task to only the frequent entities. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MEI models generalize well across domains on multiple datasets with supervised models and LLM-based few-shot prompting. Additionally, MEI fits the classification framework, which enables the use of robust and intuitive classification-based metrics. Finally, MEI is also of practical use as it allows a user to search for all mentions of a particular entity or a group of entities of interest.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.652
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11679–11695
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.652
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kawshik Sundar, Shubham Toshniwal, Makarand Tapaswi, and Vineet Gandhi. 2024. Major Entity Identification: A Generalizable Alternative to Coreference Resolution. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11679–11695, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Major Entity Identification: A Generalizable Alternative to Coreference Resolution (Sundar et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.652.pdf