Simple coreference resolution with rich syntactic and semantic features

Abstract

Coreference systems are driven by syntactic, semantic, and discourse constraints. We present a simple approach which completely modularizes these three aspects. In contrast to much current work, which focuses on learning and on the discourse component, our system is deterministic and is driven entirely by syntactic and semantic compatibility as learned from a large, unlabeled corpus. Despite its simplicity and discourse naivete, our system substantially outperforms all unsupervised systems and most supervised ones. Primary contributions include (1) the presentation of a simpleto- reproduce, high-performing baseline and (2) the demonstration that most remaining errors can be attributed to syntactic and semantic factors external to the coreference phenomenon (and perhaps best addressed by non-coreference systems). © 2009 ACL and AFNLP.