Do Lexical and Contextual Coreference Resolution Systems Degrade Differently under Mention Noise? An Empirical Study on Scientific Software Mentions

Atilla Kaan Alkan, Felix Grezes, Jennifer Lynn Bartlett, Anna Kelbert, Kelly Lockhart, Alberto Accomazzi


Abstract
We present our participation in the SOMD 2026 shared task on cross-document software mention coreference resolution, where our systems ranked second across all three subtasks. We compare two fine-tuning-free approaches: Fuzzy Matching (FM), a lexical string-similarity method, and Context Aware Representations (CAR), which combines mention-level and document-level embeddings. Both achieve competitive performance across all subtasks (CoNLL F1 of 0.94–0.96), with CAR consistently outperforming FM by 1 point on the official test set, consistent with the high surface regularity of software names, which reduces the need for complex semantic reasoning. A controlled noise-injection study reveals complementary failure modes: as boundary noise increases, CAR loses only 0.07 F1 points from clean to fully corrupted input, compared to 0.20 for FM, whereas under mention substitution, FM degrades more gracefully (0.52 vs. 0.63). Our inference-time analysis shows that FM scales superlinearly with corpus size, whereas CAR scales approximately linearly, making CAR the more efficient choice at large scale. These findings suggest that system selection should be informed by both the noise profile of the upstream mention detector and the scale of the target corpus. We release our code to support future work on this underexplored task.
Anthology ID:
2026.nslp-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of Natural Scientific Language Processing (NSLP) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Georg Rehm, Stefan Dietze, Danilo Dessi, Diana Maynard, Sonja Schimmler
Venues:
NSLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
97–107
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-nslp-10
DOI:
10.63317/2f5gzhatrnue
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Atilla Kaan Alkan, Felix Grezes, Jennifer Lynn Bartlett, Anna Kelbert, Kelly Lockhart, and Alberto Accomazzi. 2026. Do Lexical and Contextual Coreference Resolution Systems Degrade Differently under Mention Noise? An Empirical Study on Scientific Software Mentions. In Proceedings of Natural Scientific Language Processing (NSLP) @ LREC 2026, pages 97–107, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Do Lexical and Contextual Coreference Resolution Systems Degrade Differently under Mention Noise? An Empirical Study on Scientific Software Mentions (Alkan et al., NSLP 2026)
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