When Annotation Schemes Change Rules Help: A Configurable Approach to Coreference Resolution beyond OntoNotes

This paper approaches the challenge of adapting coreference resolution to different coreference phenomena and mention-border definitions when there is no access to large training data in the desired target scheme. We take a configurable, rule-based approach centered on dependency syntax input, which we test by examining coreference types not covered in benchmark corpora such as OntoNotes. These include cataphora, compound modifier coreference, generic anaphors, predicate markables, i-within-i, and metonymy. We test our system, called xrenner, using different configurations on two very different datasets: Wall Street Journal material from OntoNotes and four types Wiki data from the GUM corpus. Our system compares favorably with two leading rule based and stochastic approaches in handling the different annotation formats.