CRAC 2020

Third Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference

CRAC 2020 was the Third Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference, held at COLING 2020 (Dec 12, online).

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 and CRAC 2019 workshops 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 is 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 include, but are not limited to:

  • 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 (e.g., zero anaphora, ellipsis, event coreference)

  • Anaphora/coreference resolution in noisy data (e.g. in speech, social media)

  • Use of anaphora/coreference resolution for discourse processing

  • Annotation tools and scheme for anaphora/coreference resolution

  • Cross-lingual anaphora/coreference resolution

  • Cross-domain anaphora/coreference resolution

  • Applications of anaphora/coreference resolution (e.g., summarization, machine translation)

  • Evaluation methodology for anaphora/coreference resolution

Important dates

  • Workshop papers due: Oct 8, 2020

  • Notification of acceptance: Oct 23, 2020

  • Camera-ready papers due: Nov 1, 2020

  • Pre-recorded videos due: Nov 10, 2020

  • Workshop date: Dec 12, 2020

Workshop program

Welcome and Invited Talk

14:00–14:05: Introduction (Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Sameer Pradhan, Yulia Grishina and Vincent Ng)

14:05–15:00: Anaphora Resolution beyond OntoNotes (Juntao Yu)

Short Break

Paper Summary Session 1: Mention Detection and Deep Learning Approaches (Chair: Vincent Ng)

15:10–15:20: Anaphoric Zero Pronoun Identification: A Multilingual Approach (Abdulrahman Aloraini and Massimo Poesio)

15:20–15:30: Partially-Supervised Mention Detection (Lesly Miculicich and James Henderson)

15:30–15:40: E.T.: Entity-Transformers. Coreference Augmented Neural Language Model for Richer Mention Representations via Entity-Transformer Blocks (Nikolaos Stylianou and Ioannis Vlahavas)

15:40–15:50: Neural Coreference Resolution for Arabic (Abdulrahman Aloraini, Juntao Yu and Massimo Poesio)

15:50–16:00: Sequence-to-Sequence Networks Learn the Meaning of Reflexive Anaphora (Robert Frank and Jackson Petty)

16:00–16:10: Sequence to Sequence Coreference Resolution (Gorka Urbizu, Ander Soraluze and Olatz Arregi)

Short Break

Paper Summary Session 2: Resources, Evaluation and Beyond the Identity of Reference (Chair: Maciej Ogrodniczuk)

16:20–16:30: A Benchmark of End-to-End and Deterministic Coreference Resolution of Dutch Novels and News (Corbèn Poot and Andreas van Cranenburgh)

16:30–16:40: A Dataset for Anaphora Analysis in French E-mails (Hani Guenoune, Cédric Lopez, Kevin Cousot, Melissa Mekaoui and Mathieu Lafourcade)

16:40–16:50: Integrating Knowledge Graph Embeddings to Improve Mention Representation for Bridging Anaphora Resolution (Onkar Pandit, Pascal Denis and Liva Ralaivola)

16:50–17:00: Reference to Discourse Topics: Introducing “Global” Shell Nouns (Fabian Simonjetz)

17:00–17:10: TwiConv: A Coreference-annotated Corpus of Twitter Conversations (Berfin Aktaş and Annalena Kohnert)

17:10–17:20: Predicting Coreference in Abstract Meaning Representations (Tatiana Anikina, Alexander Koller and Michael Roth)

Short Break

Paper Summary Session 3: Applications (Chair: Sameer Pradhan)

17:30–17:40: It’s Absolutely Divine! Can Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis Benefit from Coreference Resolution? (Orphee De Clercq and Veronique Hoste)

17:40–17:50: Enhanced Labelling in Active Learning for Coreference Resolution (Vebjørn Espeland, Beatrice Alex and Benjamin Bach)

17:50–18:00: Coreference Strategies in English-German Translation (Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Marie-Pauline Krielke and Christian Hardmeier)

18:00–18:10: Reference in Team Communication for Robot-Assisted Disaster Response: An Initial Analysis (Natalia Skachkova and Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova)

18:10–18:20: Resolving Pronouns in Twitter Streams: Context can Help! (Anietie Andy, Chris Callison-Burch and Derry Tanti Wijaya)

Short Break

Plenary Session on Universal Anaphora (Chair: Massimo Poesio)

18:30–18:45: Universal Anaphora 1.0 (Massimo Poesio and Maciej Ogrodniczuk)

18:45–18:50: Coreference at Georgetown: GUM, ANNIS and Amalgum (Amir Zeldes)

18:50–18:55: Revisiting the OntoNotes Sweet-Spot Enroute to Universal Anaphora (Sameer Pradhan, Amir Zeldes, Yilun Zhu, Massimo Poesio and Juntao Yu)

18:55–19:00: Coreference in Prague dependency corpora and the UA perspective (Anna Nedoluzhko)

19:00–19:05: CODI Shared Task: Anaphora Resolution in Dialogues (Michael Strube, Massimo Poesio, Carolyn Rose, Sopan Khosla, Ramesh Manuvinakurike, Vincent Ng)

19:05–19:10: Discussion

Best Paper Award Session

19:10–19:15: Best Paper Award and Closing of the Workshop (Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Sameer Pradhan, Yulia Grishina and Vincent Ng)

Before the workshop

Oral presentations (for all accepted papers) have been pre-recorded and are still available at the workshop Web page in Underline. Videos take up to 15 mins for long papers and 10 mins for short papers. They were available for viewing by all attendees before the start of the workshop. We believe that this new virtual format should allow more time for the participants to watch the presentations at their leisure and convenience before each session and more interaction between attendees during the Q&A sessions.

Pre-workshop morning session

On December 12 an unofficial pre-workshop morning session (between 9:00 and 13:00, all times CET) was organized on Zoom and contained all pre-recorded talks played one by one to let latecomers catch up with the content.

Workshop format

The workshop started at 14:00 CET and was composed of a one-hour invited talk, three one-hour paper summary sessions and the final plenary session on Universal Anaphora. Every paper session contained six 10-minute slots for each paper split into 5-minute live talk by paper authors (the same amount of time for long and short papers) summarizing their results, and a 5-minute Q&A session (immediately after each paper).

Workshop proceedings

Workshop proceedings are available in the ACL Anthology.

Program Committee

  • Antonio Branco, University of Lisbon

  • Dan Cristea, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi

  • Stephanie Dipper, University of Bochum

  • Yulia Grishina, Amazon

  • Veronique Hoste, Ghent University

  • Sandra Kübler, Indiana University

  • Sobha Lalitha Devi, AU-KBC Research Center, Anna University of Chennai

  • Emmanuel Lassalle, Machina Capital, Paris

  • Costanza Navaretta, University of Copenhagen

  • Anna Nedoluzhko, Charles University in Prague

  • Michal Novak, Charles University in Prague

  • Constantin Orasan, University of Surrey

  • Massimo Poesio, Queen Mary University of London

  • Marta Recasens, Google

  • Yannick Versley, Amazon

  • Heike Zinsmeister, University of Hamburg

Organizing Committee

  • Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences

  • Sameer Pradhan, University of Pennsylvania and cemantix

  • Yulia Grishina, Amazon

  • Vincent Ng, University of Texas at Dallas