In plain words: A small set of memory slots holds mentions as the text is read: adding to a slot means the mentions are the same person, while replacing it forgets them. Trained end to end, it resolves pronouns strongly while reading left to right, never rereading.
Abstract
We present a new architecture for storing and accessing entity mentions during online text processing. While reading the text, entity references are identified, and may be stored by either updating or overwriting a cell in a fixed-length memory. The update operation implies coreference with the other mentions that are stored in the same cell; the overwrite operation causes these mentions to be forgotten. By encoding the memory operations as differentiable gates, it is possible to train the model end-to-end, using both a supervised anaphora resolution objective as well as a supplementary language modeling objective. Evaluation on a dataset of pronoun-name anaphora demonstrates strong performance with purely incremental text processing.
Fei Liu, Luke Zettlemoyer, Jacob Eisenstein
arXiv:1902.01541 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Feb 5, 2019 · updated Jul 9, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Published at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2019. Source code available at: https://github.com/liufly/refreader