# Subjectivity in the Annotation of Bridging Anaphora

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07297 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07297/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [MultiVerS: Improving scientific claim verification with weak supervision and full-document context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01640/) (2021)
- [GENTLE: A Genre-Diverse Multilayer Challenge Set for English NLP and Linguistic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01966/) (2023)
- [WikiGUM: Exhaustive Entity Linking for Wikification in 12 Genres](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07449/) (2021)
- [Unifying the Scope of Bridging Anaphora Types in English: Bridging Annotations in ARRAU and GUM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01170/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [DiscoTrack: A Multilingual LLM Benchmark for Discourse Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17013/) (2025)
- [GUMBridge: a Corpus for Varieties of Bridging Anaphora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07134/) (2025)
- [LLMBridge: An LLM Pipeline for End-to-end Referential Bridging Resolution in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29048/) (2026)
- [Introducing corpora Hlava Cor and Hlava AD: Human Label Variation in Coreference and Discourse Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25383/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bridging refers to the associative relationship between inferable entities in a discourse and the antecedents which allow us to understand them, such as understanding what "the door" means with respect to an aforementioned "house". As identifying associative relations between entities is an inherently subjective task, it is difficult to achieve consistent agreement in the annotation of bridging anaphora and their antecedents. In this paper, we explore the subjectivity involved in the annotation of bridging instances at three levels: anaphor recognition, antecedent resolution, and bridging subtype selection. To do this, we conduct an annotation pilot on the test set of the existing GUM corpus, and propose a newly developed classification system for bridging subtypes, which we compare to previously proposed schemes. Our results suggest that some previous resources are likely to be severely under-annotated. We also find that while agreement on the bridging subtype category was moderate, annotator overlap for exhaustively identifying instances of bridging is low, and that many disagreements resulted from subjective understanding of the entities involved.