Mention Detection for Improving Coreference Resolution in Russian Texts: A Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

The paper concerns discourse-new referent detection. The task of coreference resolution is essential in many text-mining applications. The focus in this task is to detect noun phrases (NPs) that refer to the same entity. In languages without articles, there are no overt grammatical clues in an NP for whether it introduces a new referent into discourse or it refers to one of before-mentioned entities. However, there are some theoretical researches which claim that referent first-mentioning NPs have some specific features. In our research, we examine features that serve as discourse-new detectors for NPs corresponding to discourse salient referents and provide an experiment on different features contribution to this detection. The first-mention detection could help the quality of coreference resolution systems.