Jointly Optimized Neural Coreference Resolution with Mutual Attention

Abstract

Coreference resolution aims at recognizing different forms in a document which refer to the same entity in the real world. Although many models have been proposed and achieved success, there still exist some challenges. Recent models that use recurrent neural networks to obtain mention representations ignore dependencies between spans and their proceeding distant spans, which will lead to predicted clusters that are locally consistent but globally inconsistent. In addition, these models are trained only by maximizing the marginal likelihood of gold antecedent spans from coreference clusters, which will make some gold mentions undetectable and cause unsatisfactory coreference results. To address these challenges, we propose a neural coreference resolution model. It employs mutual attention to take into account the dependencies between spans and their proceeding spans directly (use attention mechanism to capture global information between spans and their proceeding spans). And our model is trained by jointly optimizing mention clustering and imbalanced mention detection, which enables it to detect more gold mentions in a document to make more accurate coreference decisions. Experimental results on the CoNLL-2012 English dataset show that our model can detect the most gold mentions and achieve the state-of-the-art coreference performance compared with baselines.