Knowledge-lean projection of coreference chains across languages

Abstract

Common technologies for automatic coreference resolution require either a language-specific rule set or large collections of manually annotated data, which is typically limited to newswire texts in major languages. This makes it difficult to develop coreference resolvers for a large number of the so-called low-resourced languages. We apply a direct projection algorithm on a multi-genre and multilingual corpus (English, German, Russian) to automatically produce coreference annotations for two target languages without exploiting any linguistic knowledge of the languages. Our evaluation of the projected annotations shows promising results, and the error analysis reveals structural differences of referring expressions and coreference chains for the three languages, which can now be targeted with more linguistically-informed projection algorithms.