Unifying the Scope of Bridging Anaphora Types in English: Bridging Annotations in ARRAU and GUM

TL;DR

This paper compares bridging annotations across multiple coreference resources to address standardization issues, analyzing differences and releasing harmonized datasets for improved evaluation of bridging resolution.

Contribution

It introduces a unified schema for bridging annotations and provides harmonized test sets across GUM, GENTLE, and ARRAU corpora to facilitate cross-domain evaluation.

Findings

Large differences in bridging phenomena annotations across resources

Harmonized datasets enable more reliable cross-domain evaluation

Analysis reveals diverse types of bridging phenomena

Abstract

Comparing bridging annotations across coreference resources is difficult, largely due to a lack of standardization across definitions and annotation schemas and narrow coverage of disparate text domains across resources. To alleviate domain coverage issues and consolidate schemas, we compare guidelines and use interpretable predictive models to examine the bridging instances annotated in the GUM, GENTLE and ARRAU corpora. Examining these cases, we find that there is a large difference in types of phenomena annotated as bridging. Beyond theoretical results, we release a harmonized, subcategorized version of the test sets of GUM, GENTLE and the ARRAU Wall Street Journal data to promote meaningful and reliable evaluation of bridging resolution across domains.