# Okay, Let's Do This! Modeling Event Coreference with Generated Rationales and Knowledge Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03196 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03196/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge distillation for LLMs, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 32 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2024.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Knowledge distillation for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/distill/knowledge-distillation-for-llms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04319/) (2019)
- [Texygen: A Benchmarking Platform for Text Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01886/) (2018)
- [Explain Yourself! Leveraging Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02361/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models Are Reasoning Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10071/) (2022)
- [Abductive Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05739/) (2019)
- [Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07178/) (2021)
- [Measuring Association Between Labels and Free-Text Rationales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12762/) (2020)
- [Distilling Reasoning Capabilities into Smaller Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00193/) (2022)
- [WT5?! Training Text-to-Text Models to Explain their Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14546/) (2020)
- [Reframing Human-AI Collaboration for Generating Free-Text Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08674/) (2021)
- [Cross-document Coreference Resolution over Predicted Mentions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01210/) (2021)
- [ExpBERT: Representation Engineering with Natural Language Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01932/) (2020)
- [Resolving Event Coreference with Supervised Representation Learning and Clustering-Oriented Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10985/) (2018)
- [Event Coreference Resolution by Iteratively Unfolding Inter-dependencies among Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07344/) (2017)
- [Generalizing Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution Across Multiple Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12249/) (2020)
- [Focus on what matters: Applying Discourse Coherence Theory to Cross Document Coreference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05362/) (2021)
- [Investigating the Benefits of Free-Form Rationales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11083/) (2022)
- [2 * n is better than n2: Decomposing Event Coreference Resolution into Two Tractable Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05672/) (2023)
- [A Hierarchical Distance-dependent Bayesian Model for Event Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.05929/) (2015)
- [What happens before and after: Multi-Event Commonsense in Event Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09715/) (2023)
- [Abductive Commonsense Reasoning Exploiting Mutually Exclusive Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14618/) (2023)
- [Using Automatically Extracted Minimum Spans to Disentangle Coreference Evaluation from Boundary Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06703/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Argument-Centric Causal Intervention Method for Mitigating Bias in Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01488/) (2025)
- [Flout at Your Own Risk: LLMs Struggle with Pragmatic Cooperativity Under Epistemic Asymmetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11053/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In NLP, Event Coreference Resolution (ECR) is the task of connecting event clusters that refer to the same underlying real-life event, usually via neural systems. In this work, we investigate using abductive free-text rationales (FTRs) generated by modern autoregressive LLMs as distant supervision of smaller student models for cross-document coreference (CDCR) of events. We implement novel rationale-oriented event clustering and knowledge distillation methods for event coreference scoring that leverage enriched information from the FTRs for improved CDCR without additional annotation or expensive document clustering. Our model using coreference specific knowledge distillation achieves SOTA B3 F1 on the ECB+ and GVC corpora and we establish a new baseline on the AIDA Phase 1 corpus. Our code can be found at https://github.com/csu-signal/llama_cdcr