Do UD Trees Match Mention Spans in Coreference Annotations?

One can find dozens of data resources for various languages in which coreference – a relation between two or more expressions that refer to the same real-world entity – is manually annotated. One could also assume that such expressions usually constitute syntactically meaningful units; however, mention spans have been annotated simply by delimiting token intervals in most coreference projects, i.e., independently of any syntactic representation. We argue that it could be advantageous to make syntactic and coreference annotations convergent in the long term. We present a pilot empirical study focused on matches and mismatches between handannotated linear mention spans and automatically parsed syntactic trees that follow Universal Dependencies conventions. The study covers 9 datasets for 8 different languages.

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