Matching Verb Attributes for Cross-Document Event Coreference

Collateral texts of different genre can describe the same filmed story, e.g. audio description and plot summaries. We deal with the challenge of cross-document coreference for events by matching verb attributes. Cross document coreference is the task of deciding whether two linguistic descriptions from different sources refer to the same event. This is important for reliable information integration, as well as generating richer machine-executable representations of multimedia material in retrieval and browsing systems. Corpora of audio description and plot summaries were analysed to investigate how they describe the same film events. This analysis shows that events are described by different verbs in the two corpora and has inspired the algorithms for cross-document event coreference, which match verb attributes, rather than verbs themselves. The preliminary evaluation was encouraging, showing a significantly better performance than the baseline algorithm.