We present a novel hierarchical distance-dependent Bayesian model for event coreference resolution. While existing generative models for event coreference resolution are completely unsupervised, our model allows for the incorporation of pairwise distances between event mentions -- information that is widely used in supervised coreference models to guide the generative clustering processing for better event clustering both within and across documents. We model the distances between event mentions using a feature-rich learnable distance function and encode them as Bayesian priors for nonparametric clustering. Experiments on the ECB+ corpus show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods for both within- and cross-document event coreference resolution.
Event coreference resolution is a more complex task than entity coreference resolution @cite_11 and also has been relatively less studied. Existing work has adapted similar ideas to those used in entity coreference. first proposed a deterministic clustering mechanism to group event mentions of pre-specified types based on hard constraints. Later approaches @cite_8 @cite_22 applied learning-based pairwise classification decisions using event-specific features to infer event clustering. Bejan and Harabagiu proposed several unsupervised generative models for event mention clustering based on the hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP) @cite_21 . Our approach is related to both supervised clustering and generative clustering approaches. It is a nonparametric Bayesian model in nature but encodes rich linguistic features in clustering priors. More recent work modeled both entity and event information in event coreference. showed that iteratively merging entity and event clusters can boost the clustering performance. demonstrated the benefits of propagating information between event arguments and event mentions during a post-processing step. Other work modeled event coreference as a predicate argument alignment problem between pairs of sentences, and trained classifiers for making alignment decisions @cite_6 @cite_4 . Our model also leverages event argument information into the decisions of event coreference but incorporates it into Bayesian clustering priors.
@cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_8 @cite_21 @cite_6 @cite_11
2014394530 2096335387 2160583993 2147706904
The task of event coreference resolution plays a critical role in many natural language processing applications such as information extraction, question answering, and topic detection and tracking. In this article, we describe a new class of unsupervised, nonparametric Bayesian models with the purpose of probabilistically inferring coreference clusters of event mentions from a collection of unlabeled documents. In order to infer these clusters, we automatically extract various lexical, syntactic, and semantic features for each event mention from the document collection. Extracting a rich set of features for each event mention allows us to cast event coreference resolution as the task of grouping together the mentions that share the same features they have the same participating entities, share the same location, happen at the same time, etc.. Some of the most important challenges posed by the resolution of event coreference in an unsupervised way stem from a the choice of representing event mentions through a rich set of features and b the ability of modeling events described both within the same document and across multiple documents. Our first unsupervised model that addresses these challenges is a generalization of the hierarchical Dirichlet process. This new extension presents the hierarchical Dirichlet process's ability to capture the uncertainty regarding the number of clustering components and, additionally, takes into account any finite number of features associated with each event mention. Furthermore, to overcome some of the limitations of this extension, we devised a new hybrid model, which combines an infinite latent class model with a discrete time series model. The main advantage of this hybrid model stands in its capability to automatically infer the number of features associated with each event mention from data and, at the same time, to perform an automatic selection of the most informative features for the task of event coreference. The evaluation performed for solving both within-and cross-document event coreference shows significant improvements of these models when compared against two baselines for this task. We introduce a novel coreference resolution system that models entities and events jointly. Our iterative method cautiously constructs clusters of entity and event mentions using linear regression to model cluster merge operations. As clusters are built, information flows between entity and event clusters through features that model semantic role dependencies. Our system handles nominal and verbal events as well as entities, and our joint formulation allows information from event coreference to help entity coreference, and vice versa. In a cross-document domain with comparable documents, joint coreference resolution performs significantly better (over 3 CoNLL F1 points) than two strong baselines that resolve entities and events separately. This paper examines how a new class of nonparametric Bayesian models can be effectively applied to an open-domain event coreference task. Designed with the purpose of clustering complex linguistic objects, these models consider a potentially infinite number of features and categorical outcomes. The evaluation performed for solving both within- and cross-document event coreference shows significant improvements of the models when compared against two baselines for this task. We present an unsupervised, nonparametric Bayesian approach to coreference resolution which models both global entity identity across a corpus as well as the sequential anaphoric structure within each document. While most existing coreference work is driven by pairwise decisions, our model is fully generative, producing each mention from a combination of global entity properties and local attentional state. Despite being unsupervised, our system achieves a 70.3 MUC F1 measure on the MUC-6 test set, broadly in the range of some recent supervised results.