# An Annotated Dataset of Coreference in English Literature

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.01140 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01140/

## Key facts

- Cited by 58 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Entity Tracking in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02363/) (2023)
- [On Generalization in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09667/) (2021)
- [Emotion Dynamics in Movie Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01345/) (2021)
- [Maverick: Efficient and Accurate Coreference Resolution Defying Recent Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21489/) (2024)
- [Moving on from OntoNotes: Coreference Resolution Model Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08457/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Fall Short: Understanding Complex Relationships in Detective Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11051/) (2024)
- [The Project Dialogism Novel Corpus: A Dataset for Quotation Attribution in Literary Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05836/) (2022)
- [Adapting Coreference Resolution Models through Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07611/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Machine Narrative Reading Comprehension Assessments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00299/) (2022)
- [Seq2seq is All You Need for Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13774/) (2023)
- [Findings of the Third Shared Task on Multilingual Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15949/) (2024)
- [Grounding Characters and Places in Narrative Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17561/) (2023)
- [Improving Automatic Quotation Attribution in Literary Novels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03734/) (2023)
- [Major Entity Identification: A Generalizable Alternative to Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14654/) (2024)
- [[Lions: 1] and [Tigers: 2] and [Bears: 3], Oh My! Literary Coreference Annotation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17922/) (2024)
- [Neural Natural Language Processing for Long Texts: A Survey on Classification and Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16259/) (2023)
- [Mention Annotations Alone Enable Efficient Domain Adaptation for Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07602/) (2022)
- [Challenges to Evaluating the Generalization of Coreference Resolution Models: A Measurement Modeling Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09092/) (2023)
- [Findings of the Fourth Shared Task on Multilingual Coreference Resolution: Can LLMs Dethrone Traditional Approaches?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17796/) (2025)
- [LiteraryQA: Towards Effective Evaluation of Long-document Narrative QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13494/) (2025)
- [What is Wrong with Language Models that Can Not Tell a Story?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05044/) (2022)
- [IdentifyMe: A Challenging Long-Context Mention Resolution Benchmark for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07466/) (2024)
- [The Elephant in the Coreference Room: Resolving Coreference in Full-Length French Fiction Works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15594/) (2025)
- [A Structured Span Selector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03977/) (2022)
- [Event Extraction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03419/) (2022)
- [Aggregating Crowdsourced and Automatic Judgments to Scale Up a Corpus of Anaphoric Reference for Fiction and Wikipedia Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05581/) (2022)
- [Improving Quotation Attribution with Fictional Character Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11368/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Computational Representations of Character: An Austen Character Similarity Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16131/) (2024)
- [BOOKCOREF: Coreference Resolution at Book Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12075/) (2025)
- [Evaluating the Impact of a Hierarchical Discourse Representation on Entity Coreference Resolution Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10215/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present in this work a new dataset of coreference annotations for works of literature in English, covering 29,103 mentions in 210,532 tokens from 100 works of fiction. This dataset differs from previous coreference datasets in containing documents whose average length (2,105.3 words) is four times longer than other benchmark datasets (463.7 for OntoNotes), and contains examples of difficult coreference problems common in literature. This dataset allows for an evaluation of cross-domain performance for the task of coreference resolution, and analysis into the characteristics of long-distance within-document coreference.