# Generalizing Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution Across Multiple Corpora

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.12249 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12249/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [2 * n is better than n2: Decomposing Event Coreference Resolution into Two Tractable Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05672/) (2023)
- [Cross-document Event Coreference Search: Task, Dataset and Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12654/) (2022)
- [XCoref: Cross-document Coreference Resolution in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05252/) (2021)
- [Any Other Thoughts, Hedgehog? Linking Deliberation Chains in Collaborative Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19301/) (2024)
- [A Rationale-centric Counterfactual Data Augmentation Method for Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01921/) (2024)
- [Event Extraction in Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19537/) (2025)
- [Towards Evaluation of Cross-document Coreference Resolution Models Using Datasets with Diverse Annotation Schemes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05250/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution Using Linear Semantic Transfer and Mixed-Modality Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08949/) (2024)
- [Synergetic Event Understanding: A Collaborative Approach to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02148/) (2024)
- [Okay, Let's Do This! Modeling Event Coreference with Generated Rationales and Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03196/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Are Effective Human Annotation Assistants, But Not Good Independent Annotators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06778/) (2025)
- [EasyECR: A Library for Easy Implementation and Evaluation of Event Coreference Resolution Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14106/) (2024)
- [Link Prediction for Event Logs in the Process Industry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09096/) (2025)
- [Distributed Partial Information Puzzles: Examining Common Ground Construction Under Epistemic Asymmetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05450/) (2026)
- [An Inclusive Notion of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05604/) (2022)
- [Argument-Centric Causal Intervention Method for Mitigating Bias in Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01488/) (2025)
- [Piecing Together Cross-Document Coreference Resolution Datasets: Systematic Dataset Analysis and Unification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00621/) (2026)
- [From Single- to Cross-Document: Benchmarking Multi-Granularity Event Analysis of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27654/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-document event coreference resolution (CDCR) is an NLP task in which mentions of events need to be identified and clustered throughout a collection of documents. CDCR aims to benefit downstream multi-document applications, but despite recent progress on corpora and system development, downstream improvements from applying CDCR have not been shown yet. We make the observation that every CDCR system to date was developed, trained, and tested only on a single respective corpus. This raises strong concerns on their generalizability -- a must-have for downstream applications where the magnitude of domains or event mentions is likely to exceed those found in a curated corpus. To investigate this assumption, we define a uniform evaluation setup involving three CDCR corpora: ECB+, the Gun Violence Corpus and the Football Coreference Corpus (which we reannotate on token level to make our analysis possible). We compare a corpus-independent, feature-based system against a recent neural system developed for ECB+. Whilst being inferior in absolute numbers, the feature-based system shows more consistent performance across all corpora whereas the neural system is hit-and-miss. Via model introspection, we find that the importance of event actions, event time, etc. for resolving coreference in practice varies greatly between the corpora. Additional analysis shows that several systems overfit on the structure of the ECB+ corpus. We conclude with recommendations on how to achieve generally applicable CDCR systems in the future -- the most important being that evaluation on multiple CDCR corpora is strongly necessary. To facilitate future research, we release our dataset, annotation guidelines, and system implementation to the public.