Cross-document coreference: An approach to capturing coreference without context

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss a cross-document coreference annotation schema that we developed to further automatic extraction of timelines in the clinical domain. Lexical senses and coreference choices are determined largely by context, but cross-document work requires reasoning across contexts that are not necessarily coherent. We found that an annotation approach that relies less on context-guided annotator intuitions and more on schematic rules was most effective in creating meaningful and consistent cross-document relations.