Rule-based Coreference Resolution in German Historic Novels
Markus K. Krug, Frank Puppe, Fotis Jannidis, Luisa Macharowsky, Isabella Reger, Lukas Weimer · 2015
Coreference resolution (CR) is a key task in the automated analysis of characters in stories. Standard CR systems usually trained on newspaper texts have difficulties with literary texts, even with novels; a comparison with newspaper texts showed that average sentence length is greater in novels and the number of pronouns, as well as the percentage of direct speech is higher. We report promising evaluation results for a rule-based system similar to [Lee et al. 2011], but tailored to the domain which recognizes coreference chains in novels much better than CR systems like CorZu. Rule-based systems performed best on the CoNLL 2011 challenge [Pradhan et al. 2011]. Recent work in machine learning showed similar results as rule-based systems [Durett et al. 2013]. The latter has the advantage that its explanation component facilitates a fine grained error analysis for incremental refinement of the rules.