# SPLICE: A Singleton-Enhanced PipeLIne for Coreference REsolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17245 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17245/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Coreference Resolution as Query-based Span Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01746/) (2019)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Mention-Ranking Coreference Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08667/) (2016)
- [Improving Coreference Resolution by Learning Entity-Level Distributed Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01323/) (2016)
- [A Sequence-to-Set Network for Nested Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08901/) (2021)
- [Word-Level Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04127/) (2021)
- [Coreference Resolution through a seq2seq Transition-Based System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12142/) (2022)
- [On Generalization in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09667/) (2021)
- [Learning Global Features for Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03035/) (2016)
- [GENTLE: A Genre-Diverse Multilayer Challenge Set for English NLP and Linguistic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01966/) (2023)
- [OntoGUM: Evaluating Contextualized SOTA Coreference Resolution on 12 More Genres](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00933/) (2021)
- [Neural Mention Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12524/) (2019)
- [Incorporating Singletons and Mention-based Features in Coreference Resolution via Multi-task Learning for Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11582/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Singleton mentions, i.e.~entities mentioned only once in a text, are important to how humans understand discourse from a theoretical perspective. However previous attempts to incorporate their detection in end-to-end neural coreference resolution for English have been hampered by the lack of singleton mention spans in the OntoNotes benchmark. This paper addresses this limitation by combining predicted mentions from existing nested NER systems and features derived from OntoNotes syntax trees. With this approach, we create a near approximation of the OntoNotes dataset with all singleton mentions, achieving ~94% recall on a sample of gold singletons. We then propose a two-step neural mention and coreference resolution system, named SPLICE, and compare its performance to the end-to-end approach in two scenarios: the OntoNotes test set and the out-of-domain (OOD) OntoGUM corpus. Results indicate that reconstructed singleton training yields results comparable to end-to-end systems for OntoNotes, while improving OOD stability (+1.1 avg. F1). We conduct error analysis for mention detection and delve into its impact on coreference clustering, revealing that precision improvements deliver more substantial benefits than increases in recall for resolving coreference chains.