A Global Relaxation Labeling Approach to Coreference Resolution

1. A Global Relaxation Labeling Approach to Coreference Resolution Coling2010 Emili Sapena, Llu´ıs Padr´o and Jordi Turmo TALP Research Center UniversitatPolit`ecnica de Catalunya Yi-Ting Huang 2011/01/25

2. Outline • Introduction • Notation • Method • Relaxation Labeling: weighted constraint satisfaction problem • Initial State • Model: C4.5 • Pruning • Reordering • Experiments • Conclusion

3. 1. Introduction (1/6) • Coreference resolution is the task of partitioning a set of entity mentions in a text, where each partition corresponds to some entity in an underlying discourse model. a entity/label a mention NP1….N2……. ………PN3....... ……NP4……… N5…NP6….. NP1….N2……. ………PN3....... ……NP4……… N5…NP6….. N: name entity, e.g. “Michael Jackson” NP: noun phrase, e.g. “the youngest of Jackson” PN: pronoun, e.g. “he”

4. 1. Introduction (2/6) • A typical machine learning-based coreference resolution system usually consists of two steps: • classification, where the system evaluates the coreferentialityof each pair or group of mentions. • formation of chains, where given the confidence values of the previous classifications the system forms the coreference chains. 1. Classification 2. Formation of chains NP1….N2……. ………PN3....... ……NP4……… N5…NP6….. NP1….N2……. ………PN3....... ……NP4……… N5…NP6….. CHAIN1: NP1-N2-PN3 CHAIN2: NP4-N5-PN6

5. 1. Introduction (3/6) • Pairwiseclassification • Groupwise classification • Combine: joining each positively-classified pair or only with maximum confidence value. c1….c2……. …c3……c4.. ……c5…….. c6……m….. c1….c2……. …c3……c4.. ……c5…….. c6……m….. pair-wise classification (c1, m)=Y (c2, m)=N (c3, m)=N (c4, m)=Y (c5, m)=Y (c6, m)=N Combine entity1(c1, c4, c5, m) entity2(c2, c3) entity3(c6) twin-wise classification (c1, c2, m)=Y (c1, c3, m)=Y (c1, c6, m)=Y (c2, c1, m)=Y (c2, c3, m)=N (c2, c4, m)=N (c2, c5, m)=N (c2, c6, m)=N... Combine entity1(c1, c4, c5, m) entity2(c2, c3) entity3(c6)

6. 1. Introduction (4/6) • Chain information: Integer Linear Programming • The main advantage of these types of post-processes is the enforcement of transitivity sorting out the contradictions that the previous classification process may introduce. • A set of binary variables (xij) symbolize whether pairs of mentions (mi,mj) corefer (xij = 1) or not (xij = 0). An objective function is defined as follows: where Pcijis the confidence value of mentions mi i<j<k

7. 1. Introduction (5/6) • Although chain formation processes search for global consistency, the lack of contextual information in the classification step is propagated forward. • Few works try to overcome the limitations of keeping classification and chain formation apart. • Luo et al. (2004): Bell tree structure • McCallum and Wellner (2005): graph partitioning cutting by distances • Culotta et al. (2007) a groupwise classifier with a clustering process in a First-Order probabilistic model Luo, X., A. Ittycheriah, H. Jing, N. Kambhatla, and S. Roukos. 2004. A mention-synchronous coreference resolution algorithm based on the bell tree. In Proceedings of 42nd ACL, page 135. McCallum, A. and B. Wellner. 2005. Conditional models of identity uncertainty with application to noun coreference. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 17:905–912 Culotta, A., M. Wick, and A. McCallum. 2007. First-Order Probabilistic Models for Coreference Resolution. Proceedings of NAACL HLT, pages 81–88.

8. 1. Introduction (6/6) • The approach presented in this paper follows the same research line of joining group classification and chain formation in the same step. • We propose a graph representation of the problem solved by a relaxation labeling process, reducing coreference resolution to a graph partitioning problem given a set of constraints. • In this manner, decisions are taken considering the whole set of mentions, ensuring consistency and avoiding that classification decisions are independently taken.

9. Notation

10. Methods • Relaxation Labeling: weighted constraint satisfaction problem • Initial State • Model: C4.5 • Pruning • Reordering

11. Method - Relaxation Labeling (1/4) • Relaxation labeling (Relax) is a generic name for a family of iterative algorithms which perform function optimization, based on local information. • Relaxation labeling solves our weighted constraint satisfaction problem dealing with the edge weights.

12. Method - Relaxation Labeling (2/4) • The aim of the algorithm is to find a weighted labeling such that global consistency is maximized. • Maximizing global consistency is defined as maximizing the average support for each variable.

13. Method - Relaxation Labeling (3/4)

14. Method - Relaxation Labeling (4/4) • Many studies have been done towards the demonstration of the consistency, convergence and cost reduction advantages of the relaxation algorithm. • Although some of the conditions required by the formal demonstrations are not fulfilled in our case, the presented algorithm –that forces a stop after a number of iterations– has proven useful for practical purposes.

15. Method - Initial State • The initial state of the vertices define the a priori probabilities for each vertex to be in each partition. • uniformly distributed state • For Pronoun • Others • random Li+1, +1 stats a new entity

16. Method - Constraints

17. Method - Constraints

18. Method – C4.5 • Three specialized models are constructed depending on the type of anaphor mention (mj) of the pair: pronoun, named entity or nominal. • For each specialized model, a decision tree (DT) is generated and a set of rules is extracted with C4.5 rule-learning algorithm. • The weight assigned to a constraint (λk) is its precision over the training data (Pk), but shifted to be zero-centered: λk = Pk-0.5

19. Method - Pruning • We have found two main error patterns that can be solved by a pruning process. • The size of the document. • Each vertex is adjacent to all the other vertices. This produces that the larger the number of adjacencies, the smaller the influence of a constraint is. • This problem is usually solved looking for antecedents in a window of few sentences, which entails an evident limitation of recall. • Many weak edge weights produce a bias. • For example, the pairs (pronoun, pronoun) Is very weakly informative. • For each vertex’s adjacency list A(vi), only a maximum of N edges remain and the others are pruned.

20. Method - Reordering • The vertices of the graph would usually be placed in the same order as the mentions are found in the document (chronological). • However, as suggested by Luo (2007), there is no need to generate the model following that order. • In our approach, the first variables have a lower number of possible label: Name entity. • An error in the first variables has more influence on the performance than an error in the later ones. • Name entityNominalmentionsPronoun Luo, X. 2007. Coreference or not: A twin model for coreference resolution. In Proceedings of NAACL HLT, pages 73–80.

21. Experiments setting • Data Set: ACE-phase02 • Consider true mentions • Metrics: CEAF, B3 • Preprocessing: • FreeLing for sentences splitting and tokenization • SVMtool for POS tagging • BIO for NER and classification • No lemmatization and syntactic analysis are used.

22. Baselines • DT(decision tree) with automatic feature selectionbased on Ng and Cardie (2002) 1 • The features used in the baseline are the same. • But some features are noisy and redundant. • Hill Climbing process has been performed doing a five-fold cross-validation over the training corpus • Integer Linear Programming (Klenner, 2007 2; Denis and Baldridge, 2007 3; Finkel and Manning, 2008 4 ) 1 Ng, V. and C. Cardie. 2002. Improving machine learning approaches to coreference resolution. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 104–111. 2 Klenner, M. 2007. Enforcing consistency on coreference sets. In Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP), pages 323–328. 3 Denis, P. and J. Baldridge. 2007. Joint Determination of Anaphoricity and Coreference Resolution using Integer Programming. Proceedings of NAACL HLT, pages 236– 243. 4 Finkel, J.R. and C.D. Manning. 2008. Enforcing transitivity in coreference resolution. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the ACL HLT: Short Papers, pages 45–48. Association for Computational Linguistics.

23. Experimental Results (1/3) • 1st experiment compares the performancesofour baselines. • In 2nd experiment, only applied to documents shorter than 200 mentions due to computational cost.

24. Experimental Results (2/3) • The 3rd experiment shows the improvements achieved by the use of pruning and reordering techniques. • Pruning: B3 precision is decreased but the global F1 is increased due to a considerably improvement of recall. • Reordering: recovers the precision lost by the pruning without loosing recall, which achieves the best performances of 69.7 with CEAF and 74.9 with B3

25. Experimental Results (3/3) • The 4th experiment evaluates the influence of the initial state.

26. Conclusion • The approach for coreference resolution presented in this paper is a constraint-based graph partitioning solved by relaxation labeling. • The capacity to easily incorporate constraints from different sources and using different knowledge is also remarkable. • three tecniques to improve results have been presented: reordering, pruning and feature selection by Hill Climbing. • The approach also outperforms baseline and others in the state of the art using same corpora and metrics.

27. 5th International Workshop on Semantic EvaluationSemEval-2010 Task 1: Coreference Resolution in Multiple Languages