A Controlled Reevaluation of Coreference Resolution Models

Ian Porada, Xiyuan Zou, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung


Abstract
All state-of-the-art coreference resolution (CR) models involve finetuning a pretrained language model. Whether the superior performance of one CR model over another is due to the choice of language model or other factors, such as the task-specific architecture, is difficult or impossible to determine due to lack of a standardized experimental setup. To resolve this ambiguity, we systematically evaluate five CR models and control for certain design decisions including the pretrained language model used by each. When controlling for language model size, encoder-based CR models outperform more recent decoder-based models in terms of both accuracy and inference speed. Surprisingly, among encoder-based CR models, more recent models are not always more accurate, and the oldest CR model that we test generalizes the best to out-of-domain textual genres. We conclude that controlling for the choice of language model reduces most, but not all, of the increase in F1 score reported in the past five years.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
256–263
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.23
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ian Porada, Xiyuan Zou, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung. 2024. A Controlled Reevaluation of Coreference Resolution Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 256–263, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
A Controlled Reevaluation of Coreference Resolution Models (Porada et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.23.pdf