CRAC 2019

CRAC 2019 was the Second Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference, held on June 7 at NAACL 2019. Thank you for joining in!

About the workshop

Background: The end of Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium series in 2011 scattered the research papers on anaphora/coreference resolution among very different fora until a common event in Computational Linguistics entirely dedicated to this area was revived in 2016 with the Coreference Beyond OntoNotes (CORBON 2016) workshop co-located with NAACL and CORBON 2017 co-located with EACL. In 2018 its focus, perceived as too narrow, was broadened to cover all cases of computational modelling of reference, anaphora, and coreference with CRAC 2018 workshop held again at NAACL. Following the recent advances in application of word embeddings and deep neural networks to various NLP tasks, we believe that the task of cross-lingual coreference resolution can also benefit from the new perspective.

Objectives: The aim of the workshop was to provide a forum where work on all aspects of computational work on anaphora resolution and annotation, including both coreference and types of anaphora such as bridging references resolution and discourse deixis, can be presented.

Topics: The workshop welcomed submissions describing both theoretical and applied computational work on anaphora/coreference resolution, including on languages other than English, and less-researched types of anaphora such as bridging references.

Topics of interest included the following:

  • Coreference resolution for less-researched languages
  • Annotation and interpretation of anaphoric relations, including relations other than identity coreference (e.g., bridging references, reference to abstract entities)
  • Investigation of difficult cases of anaphora / coreference and their resolution
  • Anaphora / coreference resolution in noisy data (e.g. in speech, social media)
  • New applications of coreference resolution

Workshop program and slides

09:00–09:15: Welcome

09:15–10:30: Invited talk

Amir Zeldes (Georgetown University)

Coreference and coherence revisited

10:30–11:00: Coffee break

11:00–11:30:

Oshin Agarwal, Sanjay Subramanian, Ani Nenkova and Dan Roth

Evaluation of Named Entity Coreference

11:30–12:00:

Loïc Grobol

Neural Coreference Resolution with Limited Lexical Context and Explicit Mention Detection for Oral French

12:00–12:30:

Jenny Kunz and Christian Hardmeier

Entity Decisions in Neural Language Modelling: Approaches and Problems

12:30–14:00: Lunch break

14:00–14:30:

Kevin Blissett and Heng Ji

Cross-lingual NIL Entity Clustering for Low-resource Languages

14:30–15:00:

Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Sharid Loáiciga, Christian Hardmeier and Pauline Krielke

Cross-lingual Incongruences in the Annotation of Coreference

15:00–15:30:

Gorka Urbizu, Ander Soraluze and Olatz Arregi

Deep Cross-Lingual Coreference Resolution for Less-Resourced Languages: The Case of Basque

15:30–16:00:

Closing of the workshop

Workshop summary

The workshop received 10 submissions: half of them were from Europe, two were from the U.S., and the remaining three were from India. We were pleased to see that the submissions covered not only a variety of less-studied languages in the coreference community (e.g., Basque, French, German, Malayalam or Tamil) but also many under-investigated topics in coreference resolution (e.g., feature representation, coreference for low-resource languages, coreference in specialized domains, and evaluation of coreference resolvers).

While it is perhaps not surprising to receive submissions focusing on the design and use of neural models for coreference resolution given the recent popularity of deep learning for natural language processing, it is interesting to see that the most popular topic among the submitted papers is cross-lingual coreference resolution. In fact, one of the workshop sessions was devoted entirely to this topic.

Publication

Workshop proceedings are available at the ACL Anthology.

Program Committee

  • Antonio Branco, University of Lisbon
  • Stephanie Dipper, University of Bochum
  • Yulia Grishina, Amazon
  • Veronique Hoste, Ghent University
  • Ryu Iida, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT)
  • Sandra Kübler, Indiana University
  • Sobha Lalitha Devi, AU-KBC Research Center, Anna University of Chennai
  • Emmanuel Lassalle, Machina Capital, Paris
  • Katja Markert, Heidelberg University
  • Pavankumar Reddy Muddireddy, Google
  • Costanza Navaretta, University of Copenhagen
  • Anna Nedoluzhko, Charles University in Prague
  • Michal Novak, Charles University in Prague
  • Constantin Orasan, University of Wolverhampton
  • Massimo Poesio, Queen Mary University of London
  • Marta Recasens, Google
  • Yannick Versley, IBM
  • Heike Zinsmeister, University of Hamburg

Organizing Committee

  • Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences
  • Sameer Pradhan, cemantix.org and Vassar College
  • Yulia Grishina, Amazon
  • Vincent Ng, University of Texas at Dallas