# Coreference Resolution through a seq2seq Transition-Based System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12142 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12142/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06905/) (2021)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Neural Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07045/) (2017)
- [Higher-order Coreference Resolution with Coarse-to-fine Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05392/) (2018)
- [BERT for Coreference Resolution: Baselines and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09091/) (2019)
- [Coreference Resolution as Query-based Span Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01746/) (2019)
- [Revealing the Myth of Higher-Order Inference in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12013/) (2020)
- [Coreference Resolution without Span Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00434/) (2021)
- [Word-Level Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04127/) (2021)
- [Moving on from OntoNotes: Coreference Resolution Model Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08457/) (2021)
- [A Cluster Ranking Model for Full Anaphora Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09532/) (2019)
- [Neural Coreference Resolution for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00286/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [CoSafe: Evaluating Large Language Model Safety in Multi-Turn Dialogue Coreference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17626/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models Understand Context?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00858/) (2024)
- [Maverick: Efficient and Accurate Coreference Resolution Defying Recent Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21489/) (2024)
- [Are Large Language Models Robust Coreference Resolvers?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14489/) (2023)
- [FIZZ: Factual Inconsistency Detection by Zoom-in Summary and Zoom-out Document](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11184/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Fall Short: Understanding Complex Relationships in Detective Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11051/) (2024)
- [CAW-coref: Conjunction-Aware Word-level Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06165/) (2023)
- [Seq2seq is All You Need for Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13774/) (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)
- [Are LLMs Good Annotators for Discourse-level Event Relation Extraction?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19568/) (2024)
- [Challenges to Evaluating the Generalization of Coreference Resolution Models: A Measurement Modeling Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09092/) (2023)
- [CorPipe at CRAC 2024: Predicting Zero Mentions from Raw Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02756/) (2024)
- [A Controlled Reevaluation of Coreference Resolution Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00727/) (2024)
- [BOOKCOREF: Coreference Resolution at Book Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12075/) (2025)
- [CorPipe at CRAC 2025: Evaluating Multilingual Encoders for Multilingual Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17858/) (2025)
- [Multilingual Coreference Resolution in Low-resource South Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13571/) (2024)
- [Transforming Dutch: Debiasing Dutch Coreference Resolution Systems for Non-binary Pronouns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00134/) (2024)
- [Trusted Knowledge Extraction for Operations and Maintenance Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22935/) (2025)
- [MARRS: Multimodal Reference Resolution System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01650/) (2023)
- [Solving the Challenge Set without Solving the Task: On Winograd Schemas as a Test of Pronominal Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09448/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Coreference Resolution for Chinese Social Media Dialogues: Dataset and Benchmark Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14321/) (2025)
- [Improving LLMs' Learning for Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11466/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Span Interaction and Graph-Aware Memory for Entity-Level Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11604/) (2025)
- [SPLICE: A Singleton-Enhanced PipeLIne for Coreference REsolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17245/) (2024)
- [ThaiCoref: Thai Coreference Resolution Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06000/) (2024)
- [Reverse Probing: Evaluating Knowledge Transfer via Finetuned Task Embeddings for Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19316/) (2025)
- [Coreference as an indicator of context scope in multimodal narrative](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05298/) (2025)
- [CorefInst: Leveraging LLMs for Multilingual Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17505/) (2025)
- [Can LLMs Detect Ambiguous Plural Reference? An Analysis of Split-Antecedent and Mereological Reference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04581/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most recent coreference resolution systems use search algorithms over possible spans to identify mentions and resolve coreference. We instead present a coreference resolution system that uses a text-to-text (seq2seq) paradigm to predict mentions and links jointly. We implement the coreference system as a transition system and use multilingual T5 as an underlying language model. We obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the CoNLL-2012 datasets with 83.3 F1-score for English (a 2.3 higher F1-score than previous work (Dobrovolskii, 2021)) using only CoNLL data for training, 68.5 F1-score for Arabic (+4.1 higher than previous work) and 74.3 F1-score for Chinese (+5.3). In addition we use the SemEval-2010 data sets for experiments in the zero-shot setting, a few-shot setting, and supervised setting using all available training data. We get substantially higher zero-shot F1-scores for 3 out of 4 languages than previous approaches and significantly exceed previous supervised state-of-the-art results for all five tested languages.