The Same-head heuristic for coreference

Micha Elsner, Brown University

Abstract

We investigate coreference relationships between NPs with the same head noun. It is relatively common in unsupervised work to assume that such pairs are coreferent-- but this is not always true, especially if realistic mention detection is used. We describe the distribution of non-coreferent same-head pairs in news and conversational discourse. We present an unsupervised generative model which learns not to link some same-head NPs using syntactic features.