BenCoref: A Multi-Domain Dataset of Nominal Phrases and Pronominal Reference Annotations

Coreference Resolution is a well studied problem in NLP. While widely studied for English and other resource-rich languages, research on coreference resolution in Bengali largely remains unexplored due to the absence of relevant datasets. Bengali, being a low-resource language, exhibits greater morphological richness compared to English. In this article, we introduce a new dataset, BenCoref, comprising coreference annotations for Bengali texts gathered from four distinct domains. This relatively small dataset contains 5200 mention annotations forming 502 mention clusters within 48,569 tokens. We describe the process of creating this dataset and report performance of multiple models trained using BenCoref. We expect that our work provides some valuable insights on the variations in coreference phenomena across several domains in Bengali and encourages the development of additional resources for Bengali. Furthermore, we found poor crosslingual performance at zero-shot setting from English, highlighting the need for more language-specific resources for this task.