Coreference extension to Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank 2.0

The Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank 2.0 (PCEDT) is a parallel treebank of Czech and English comprising over 1.2 million running words in almost 50,000 sentences for each part. The treebank contains texts from the entire Penn Treebank - Wall Street Journal section and its Czech translations. On top of it, it includes three levels of rich linguistic annotation: morphological layer (part-of-speech tags, lemmas), analytical layer (labeled dependency tree of shallow syntax), and tectogrammatical layer (labeled dependency tree of deep syntax). The tectogrammatical tree consists only of the content words; however, new nodes unexpressed in a surface representation may be introduced, e.g., elided subjects in Czech.

The tectogrammatical layer is also the place where coreference relations are annotated, as it allows for annotating zero anaphora. The annotation of anaphoric relations and related phenomena in PCEDT has been so far developed in two steps:

1. PCEDT 2.0 original release
   1. grammatical coreference
   2. pronominal textual coreference
2. PCEDT 2.0 Coref release
   1. nominal textual coreference
   2. coreference with split antecedents (formally captured as bridging anaphora of the set-subset type)
   3. improved alignment of expressions bound in grammatical and pronominal textual coreference

PCEDT 2.0 original release

The original release of PCEDT 2.0 (Hajič et al., 2011; Hajič et al., 2012) captures the annotation of the so-called grammatical and pronominal textual coreference for both Czech and English. While most of the English textual coreference links were imported from the BBN Pronoun Coreference and Entity Type Corpus, the Czech coreference of the same type was annotated completely from scratch. Both the English and the Czech grammatical coreference was annotated from scratch, as well.

Grammatical coreference comprises several subtypes of relations, which mainly differ in the nature of referring expressions (e.g. relative pronoun, reflexive pronoun). Their common property is that they appear as a consequence of language-dependent grammatical rules.

On the other hand, the arguments of textual coreference are not realized by grammatical means alone, but also via context. The pronominal textual coreference includes those coreference links that use a personal, possessive, or demonstrative pronoun as a referring expression. It also includes pronouns dropped from the surface, especially in Czech (zero anaphora).

PCEDT 2.0 Coref release

The release of PCEDT 2.0 Coref (Nedoluzhko et al., 2016a, Nedoluzhko et al., 2016b) builds upon the original release of PCEDT 2.0 and extends it with further types of coreference relations and related phenomena.

Coreference

The set of coreferential relations with a specific referent is completed here by introducing the annotation of nominal textual coreference, i.e. coreference links with a nominal group as referring expression.

Bridging relations are not included in PCEDT 2.0, except for a special case of split antecedents. This is the case when the expression is coreferential with the union of antecedents A+B, both present in tectogrammatical structure of the corresponding text.

The aforementioned new annotation has in fact been conducted hand in hand with another annotation work. All the new annotation, including the annotation work in progress, is planned to be soon released in PCEDT 3.0. As in PCEDT 2.0 Coref, we aimed at releasing only the coreferential extensions: we decided to extract all the coreferential relations from the newly annotated data and import it back to the original version of PCEDT 2.0. Technically, since every node is specified by its ID, it should be easy to import the links by remembering the IDs of the two nodes forming a link. However, due to changes in the other annotation in PCEDT, some of the nodes in the new version of PCEDT might not exist in the old version. Therefore, we had to adopt a heuristics based on the node's ancestors in the tree and its semantic role to find the best replacement for the missing node. Still, the structural changes might be too extensive. In that case, our heuristics fails and the coreferential link remains unimported. The following table reveals that it concerns only 0.07% of cases. In PCEDT 3.0, all the unimported links will be present.

The coreference annotation is represented by the following attributes of tectogrammatical nodes:

• coref_gram.rf: grammatical coreference, contains an ID of the antecedent
• coref_text.rf: textual coreference, contains an ID of the antecedent
• coref_special : reference to a text segment (value segm) or exophora (value exoph)
• bridging: bridging relations (here represented only by reference to split antecedents)
  • target_node.rf: ID of the antecedent
  • type: the type of bridging; only SET_SUBSET representing reference to split antecedent in PCEDT 2.0 Coref

More information on coreference annotation can be found in the technical report.

Alignment of coreferential expressions

The alignment of tectogrammatical nodes in the original release of PCEDT 2.0 was obtained by running the GIZA++ word aligner on the surface representation of sentences. The produced links were projected up to the tectogrammatical layer, and some heuristics was applied for zeros, i.e. tectogrammatical nodes unexpressed on the surface (e.g. dropped subject pronouns). In PCEDT 2.0 Coref, an improved annotation of alignment of coreferential expressions is introduced, replacing the original alignment for the nodes under consideration. The new links come either from manual annotation or are produced by a supervised aligner trained on this manual annotation.

The coreferential expressions targeted by our improved alignment approach include central pronouns (embracing personal, possessive, and reflexive pronouns), relative pronouns, and anaphoric zeros. In fact, the set of targeted coreferential nodes was selected using solely the morpho-syntactic attributes, without the coreference information itself. Each such node is indicated by the is_align_coref attribute. More details on the classes of targeted coreferential expressions can be found in (Novák and Nedoluzhko, 2015).

The manual annotation has been conducted by two annotators for coreferential nodes in Sections wsj_1900-49. These alignment links are labeled by the coref_gold type. However, for a coreferential node that has no aligned counterpart in the other language, one could not determine if the absence of alignment is a result of a human decision or a decision by one of the automatic alignment methods. The is_align_coref attribute is annotated for this purpose. Therefore, if a tectogrammatical node belongs to one of Sections wsj_1900-49 and it has the is_align_coref attribute defined and true, it is clear that this node was treated by hand. On the other hand, all the other nodes were aligned using the original alignment, combining GIZA++ and the heuristics. The manual annotation of alignment is elaborated in greater detail in (Novák and Nedoluzhko, 2015).

A supervised aligner has been applied on all the coreferential nodes in PCEDT 2.0 Coref, except for those belonging to Sections wsj_1900-49. The links produced by this aligner are of the coref_supervised type. Analogous to the manual annotation, the is_align_coref attribute serves to indicate all the nodes treated by supervised approach, even those eventually with no counterpart. The supervised method was trained on the manually annotated data from Sections wsj_1900-49, using the features capturing the original GIZA++ alignment and the topology of tectogrammatical trees from both language sides, grammatical features, and combination of previous. The supervised alignment approach is described in a greater detail in (Novák and Žabokrtský, 2014) and (Nedoluzhko et al., 2016).

The annotation of alignment for tectogrammatical coreferential nodes is represented by the following attributes:

• is_align_coref: defined and true for the nodes whose alignment was treated either manually or using a supervised approach
• alignment: node alignment
  • counterpart.rf: the ID of the aligned counterpart
  • type: type of the alignment; in PCEDT 2.0 Coref the coref_gold and coref_supervised types are introduced for the counterparts found by hand and by the supervised method, respectively

References

• Hajič Jan, Hajičová Eva, Panevová Jarmila, Sgall Petr, Cinková Silvie, Fučíková Eva, Mikulová Marie, Pajas Petr, Popelka Jan, Semecký Jiří, Šindlerová Jana, Štěpánek Jan, Toman Josef, Urešová Zdeňka, Žabokrtský Zdeněk: Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank 2.0. Data/software, Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Prague, Czech republic, http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pcedt2.0/, 2011
• Hajič Jan, Hajičová Eva, Panevová Jarmila, Sgall Petr, Bojar Ondřej, Cinková Silvie, Fučíková Eva, Mikulová Marie, Pajas Petr, Popelka Jan, Semecký Jiří, Šindlerová Jana, Štěpánek Jan, Toman Josef, Urešová Zdeňka, Žabokrtský Zdeněk: Announcing Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank 2.0. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Copyright © European Language Resources Association, İstanbul, Turkey, ISBN 978-2-9517408-7-7, pp. 3153-3160, 2012
• Nedoluzhko Anna, Novák Michal, Cinková Silvie, Mikulová Marie, Mírovský Jiří: Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank 2.0 Coref. Data/software, Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Prague, Czech republic, http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pcedt2.0-coref/, 2016
• Nedoluzhko Anna, Novák Michal, Cinková Silvie, Mikulová Marie, Mírovský Jiří: Coreference in Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016), Copyright © European Language Resources Association, Portorož, Slovenia, ISBN ???, pp. ???-???, 2016
• Novák Michal, Nedoluzhko Anna: Correspondences between Czech and English Coreferential Expressions. In: Discours: Revue de linguistique, psycholinguistique et informatique., Vol. 16, Copyright © Presses universitaires de Caen, Caen, France, ISSN 1963-1723, pp. 1-41, Sep 2015
• Novák Michal, Žabokrtský Zdeněk: Cross-lingual Coreference Resolution of Pronouns. In: Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, Copyright © Dublin City University and Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, ISBN 978-1-941643-26-6, pp. 14-24, 2014