--- title: "Event coreference for information — Humphreys 1997" description: "Information extraction (IE) systems need to recognise when several clauses or noun phrases describe one and the same event." authors: ["Kevin Humphreys", "Robert Gaizauskas", "Saliha Azzam"] year: 1997 venue: "Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution for Unrestricted Texts" source: "https://aclanthology.org/W97-1311/" licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/humphreys-1997-event-coreference-information-extraction/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/humphreys-1997-event-coreference-information-extraction/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [1997](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/1997/) / Event coreference for information extraction # Event coreference for information extraction **Authors:** [Kevin Humphreys](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/kevin-humphreys/), [Robert Gaizauskas](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/robert-gaizauskas/), [Saliha Azzam](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/saliha-azzam/) · **Year:** 1997 · **Venue:** Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution for Unrestricted Texts · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W97-1311/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W97-1311.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2021836477) **Citations:** 81 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [35](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary Information extraction (IE) systems need to recognise when several clauses or noun phrases describe one and the same event. Otherwise they produce duplicate event records and miss role fillers scattered across sentences. The authors treat event coreference as an extension of noun-phrase coreference inside LaSIE, the system they built for the MUC-6 tasks. LaSIE stores each text's discourse entities in an inheritance-based semantic graph written in the XI knowledge representation language, so domain knowledge and the evolving discourse model share one structure. Each newly added instance is compared with earlier ones under three checks. Their types must be connected by a valid ontology path; for events, both must be sub-events of the template's key event, as hire and retire are under succession. Single-valued attributes such as time must agree, and type-specific "distinct" constraints must not apply. No event-annotated corpus existed, so the authors evaluated indirectly by toggling the mechanism on the MUC-6 management succession task. Overall gains were modest, but succession events improved more clearly. This suggests event coreference is worthwhile in IE. ## Key points - Objects and events are handled by one coreference procedure, with different constraints per type. Semantic similarity is the inverse of the path length (in nodes) between two types; for example, company vs. organisation scores 0.5. - Event coreference depends on object coreference: two events can only be merged if the entities filling their roles are themselves coreferent. - On the MUC-6 coreference task, LaSIE scored 51% recall and 71% precision. The top systems reached 63%/63% (best recall) and 59%/72% (best precision). - In the indirect evaluation on the 100-article MUC-6 scenario test corpus, enabling event coreference raised succession-event precision by 5 points and lowered recall by 1 point. - The mechanism prevented 11 spurious succession events out of 196 possible events. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [Coreference resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/coreference-resolution/) ## Cited by Cited by 35 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 19 of them have a page here, 16 not yet. - [Detecting Subevents using Discourse and Narrative Features](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aldawsari-2019-detecting-subevents-discourse-narrative-features/) - [Detecting Subevent Structure for Event Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/araki-2014-detecting-subevent-structure-event-coreference/) - [Unsupervised Event Coreference Resolution with Rich Linguistic Features](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bejan-2010-unsupervised-event-coreference-resolution-rich/) - [Unsupervised Event Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bejan-2014-unsupervised-event-coreference-resolution/) - [Graph-based Event Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chen-2009-graph-based-event-coreference-resolution/) - [A Pairwise Event Coreference Model, Feature Impact and Evaluation for Event Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chen-2009-pairwise-event-coreference-model-feature/) - [Chinese Event Coreference Resolution: Understanding the State of the Art](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chen-2013-chinese-event-coreference-resolution-understanding/) - [SinoCoreferencer: An End-to-End Chinese Event Coreference Resolver](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chen-2014-sinocoreferencer-end-end-chinese-event/) - [Chinese Event Coreference Resolution: An Unsupervised Probabilistic Model Rivaling Supervised Resolvers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/chen-2015-chinese-event-coreference-resolution-unsupervised/) - [Event Coreference Resolution by Iteratively Unfolding Inter-dependencies among Events](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/choubey-2017-event-coreference-resolution-iteratively-unfolding/) - [Translating Granularity of Event Slots into Features for Event Coreference Resolution.](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/cybulska-2015-translating-granularity-event-slots-into/) - [A Rationale-centric Counterfactual Data Augmentation Method for Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ding-2024-rationale-centric-counterfactual-data-augmentation/) - [Joint Entity and Event Coreference Resolution across Documents](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lee-2012-joint-entity-event-coreference-resolution/) - [Joint Inference for Event Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lu-2016-joint-inference-event-coreference-resolution/) - [Finding Contradictions in Text](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marneffe-2008-finding-contradictions-text/) - [Multimodal Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution Using Linear Semantic Transfer and Mixed-Modality Ensembles](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nath-2024-multimodal-cross-document-event-coreference/) - [A Probabilistic Annotation Model for Crowdsourcing Coreference](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/paun-2018-probabilistic-annotation-model-crowdsourcing-coreference/) - [Event Detection and Co-reference with Minimal Supervision](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/peng-2016-event-detection-co-reference-minimal/) - [Revisiting the Evaluation for Cross Document Event Coreference](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/upadhyay-2016-revisiting-evaluation-cross-document-event/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{humphreys1997event, title = {{Event coreference for information extraction}}, author = {Humphreys, Kevin and Gaizauskas, Robert and Azzam, Saliha}, booktitle = {Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution for Unrestricted Texts}, year = {1997}, doi = {10.3115/1598819.1598830}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1598819.1598830} } ``` - [← previous Enriching lexical transfer with cross-linguistic semantic features or how to do interlingua without interlingua](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nasr-1997-enriching-lexical-transfer-cross-linguistic/) - [next → Factors in anaphora resolution: they are not the only things that matter. A case study based on two different approaches](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mitkov-1997-factors-anaphora-resolution-they-are/) - [↑ back to papers of 1997](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/1997/) ## References 15 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Allen, J. 1987. Natural Language Understanding. Benjamin/Cummings, Menlo Park, CA, 1st edition. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Allen%2C+J%2E+1987%2E+Natural+Language+Understanding%2E+Benjamin%2FCummings%2C+Menlo+Park%2C+CA%2C+1st+edition%2E) 2. Appelt, D., J. Hobbs, J. Bear, D. Israel, M. Kameyama, A. Kehler, D. Martin, K. Myers, and M. Tyson. 1995. SRI International FAS-TUS system: MUC-6 Test Results and Analysis. In Proceedings of the Sixth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-6), pages 237-248. Morgan Kaufmann. 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