End-to-end Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Coreference Resolution

ACL 2019  ·  Hongliang Fei, Xu Li, Dingcheng Li, Ping Li ·

Recent neural network models have significantly advanced the task of coreference resolution. However, current neural coreference models are usually trained with heuristic loss functions that are computed over a sequence of local decisions. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end reinforcement learning based coreference resolution model to directly optimize coreference evaluation metrics. Specifically, we modify the state-of-the-art higher-order mention ranking approach in Lee et al. (2018) to a reinforced policy gradient model by incorporating the reward associated with a sequence of coreference linking actions. Furthermore, we introduce maximum entropy regularization for adequate exploration to prevent the model from prematurely converging to a bad local optimum. Our proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the English OntoNotes v5.0 benchmark.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Benchmark
Coreference Resolution CoNLL 2012 reinforced model + ELMO Avg F1 73.8 # 13
Coreference Resolution OntoNotes Reinforced + ELMo F1 73.8 # 17

Methods