Joint Coreference Resolution and Named-Entity Linking with Multi-Pass Sieves

Many errors in coreference resolution come from semantic mismatches due to inadequate world knowledge. Errors in named-entity linking (NEL), on the other hand, are often caused by superficial modeling of entity context. This paper demonstrates that these two tasks are complementary. We introduce NECO, a new model for named entity linking and coreference resolution, which solves both problems jointly, reducing the errors made on each. NECO extends the Stanford deterministic coreference system by automatically linking mentions to Wikipedia and introducing new NEL-informed mention-merging sieves. Linking improves mention-detection and enables new semantic attributes to be incorporated from Freebase, while coreference provides better context modeling by propagating named-entity links within mention clusters. Experiments show consistent improvements across a number of datasets and experimental conditions, including over 11% reduction in MUC coreference error and nearly 21% reduction in F1 NEL error on ACE 2004 newswire data.