The Universal Anaphora Scorer

The aim of the Universal Anaphora initiative is to push forward the state of the art in anaphora and anaphora resolution by expanding the aspects of anaphoric interpretation which are or can be reliably annotated in anaphoric corpora, producing unified standards to annotate and encode these annotations, deliver datasets encoded according to these standards, and developing methods for evaluating models carrying out this type of interpretation. Such expansion of the scope of anaphora resolution requires a comparable expansion of the scope of the scorers used to evaluate this work. In this paper, we introduce an extended version of the Reference Coreference Scorer (Pradhan et al., 2014) that can be used to evaluate the extended range of anaphoric interpretation included in the current Universal Anaphora proposal. The UA scorer supports the evaluation of identity anaphora resolution and of bridging reference resolution, for which scorers already existed but not integrated in a single package. It also supports the evaluation of split antecedent anaphora and discourse deixis, for which no tools existed. The proposed approach to the evaluation of split antecedent anaphora is entirely novel; the proposed approach to the evaluation of discourse deixis leverages the encoding of discourse deixis proposed in Universal Anaphora to enable the use for discourse deixis of the same metrics already used for identity anaphora. The scorer was tested in the recent CODI-CRAC 2021 Shared Task on Anaphora Resolution in Dialogues.