They Exist! Introducing Plural Mentions to Coreference Resolution and Entity Linking

This paper analyzes arguably the most challenging yet under-explored aspect of resolution tasks such as coreference resolution and entity linking, that is the resolution of plural mentions. Unlike singular mentions each of which represents one entity, plural mentions stand for multiple entities. To tackle this aspect, we take the character identification corpus from the SemEval 2018 shared task that consists of entity annotation for singular mentions, and expand it by adding annotation for plural mentions. We then introduce a novel coreference resolution algorithm that selectively creates clusters to handle both singular and plural mentions, and also a deep learning-based entity linking model that jointly handles both types of mentions through multi-task learning. Adjusted evaluation metrics are proposed for these tasks as well to handle the uniqueness of plural mentions. Our experiments show that the new coreference resolution and entity linking models significantly outperform traditional models designed only for singular mentions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that plural mentions are thoroughly analyzed for these two resolution tasks.