---
title: "Coreference Resolution Using Competition — Yang 2003"
description: "The paper argues that standard supervised coreference systems fall short because they score each antecedent candidate on its own."
authors: ["Xiaofeng Yang", "Guodong Zhou", "Jian Su", "Chew Lim Tan"]
year: 2003
venue: "Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/P03-1023/"
doi: "10.3115/1075096.1075119"
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/yang-2003-coreference-resolution-competition-learning-approach/"
---
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# Coreference Resolution Using Competition Learning Approach

**Authors:** [Xiaofeng Yang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/xiaofeng-yang/), [Guodong Zhou](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/guodong-zhou/), [Jian Su](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jian-su/), [Chew Lim Tan](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/chew-lim-tan/) · **Year:** 2003 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics · **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/P03-1023/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P03-1023.pdf) · [DOI 10.3115/1075096.1075119](https://doi.org/10.3115/1075096.1075119) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2161771536)

**Citations:** 140 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [44](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper argues that standard supervised coreference systems fall short because they score each antecedent candidate on its own. In this single-candidate setup, a classifier's confidence value is used to rank competitors, but it does not model how candidates compare with one another. Yang et al. instead propose a twin-candidate ("competition learning") model. Each training instance pairs an anaphor with one coreferent and one non-coreferent candidate, and the classifier, trained with C5.0, learns which of the two is preferable. At resolution time, every candidate is compared with every other one. The candidate that wins the most pairwise contests is chosen, and ties go to the nearest one. A candidate filter, built from a single-candidate classifier, removes implausible NPs first to cut computation and noise. The authors also show formally that the single-candidate model is a special case of the twin-candidate one. On the MUC-6 and MUC-7 data, the approach beats a single-candidate baseline, mostly through better pronoun resolution. This suggests that learning preferences directly works better than ranking by isolated confidence scores.

## Key points
- Overall MUC-score F-measure rises over the single-candidate baseline (Ng and Cardie, 2002a): from 69.4 to 71.3 on MUC-6 and from 58.7 to 60.2 on MUC-7.
- Pronoun resolution shows the largest gains:
  - F-measure is about 3.2 points higher on MUC-6 and 1.6 points higher on MUC-7 than the baseline.
  - It is about 21.1 and 13.1 points higher than the twin-candidate system of Connolly et al. (1997), which lacks candidate filtering.
- Non-pronoun resolution improves only slightly. Precision is high (90.4 on MUC-6, 87.6 on MUC-7), but recall is low (51.3 and 39.7). The authors attribute this to strong cues such as alias, apposition and string matching dominating these cases.
- Compared with Connolly et al., the method adds a candidate filter, uses round-robin win counting instead of a greedy pairwise elimination, and includes richer features (Appositive, Name Alias, String-matching).
- Future work includes a looser filter combined with anaphoricity determination, and more syntactic features such as grammatical role and parallelism.

*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

44 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 23 of them have a page here, 21 not yet.

- [Extending BART to Provide a Coreference Resolution System for German](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/broscheit-2010-extending-bart-provide-coreference-resolution/)
- [Latent Trees for Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/fernandes-2014-latent-trees-coreference-resolution/)
- [A Coreference Corpus and Resolution System for Dutch](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hendrickx-2008-coreference-corpus-resolution-system-dutch/)
- [Critical Reflections on Evaluation Practices in Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/holen-2013-critical-reflections-evaluation-practices-coreference/)
- [Exploiting Syntactic Patterns as Clues in Zero-Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/iida-2006-exploiting-syntactic-patterns-as-clues/)
- [Dependency-driven Anaphoricity Determination for Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kong-2010-dependency-driven-anaphoricity-determination-coreference/)
- [A Tree Kernel-Based Unified Framework for Chinese Zero Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kong-2010-tree-kernel-based-unified-framework/)
- [A Mention-Synchronous Coreference Resolution Algorithm Based On the Bell Tree](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/luo-2004-mention-synchronous-coreference-resolution-algorithm/)
- [Multi-Lingual Coreference Resolution With Syntactic Features](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/luo-2005-multi-lingual-coreference-resolution-syntactic/)
- [Coreference or Not: A Twin Model for Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/luo-2007-coreference-or-not-twin-model/)
- [Comparing Knowledge Sources for Nominal Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/markert-2005-comparing-knowledge-sources-nominal-anaphora/)
- [Exploiting Semantic Role Labeling, WordNet and Wikipedia for Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ponzetto-2006-exploiting-semantic-role-labeling-wordnet/)
- [A Global Relaxation Labeling Approach to Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sapena-2010-global-relaxation-labeling-approach-coreference/)
- [A Constraint-Based Hypergraph Partitioning Approach to Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sapena-2013-constraint-based-hypergraph-partitioning-approach/)
- [Conundrums in Noun Phrase Coreference Resolution: Making Sense of the State-of-the-Art](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/stoyanov-2009-conundrums-noun-phrase-coreference-resolution/)
- [Coreference Resolution with Reconcile](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/stoyanov-2010-coreference-resolution-reconcile/)
- [Easy-first Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/stoyanov-2012-easy-first-coreference-resolution/)
- [Improving Pronoun Resolution by Incorporating Coreferential Information of Candidates](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yang-2004-improving-pronoun-resolution-incorporating-coreferential/)
- [Improving Pronoun Resolution Using Statistics-Based Semantic Compatibility Information](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yang-2005-improving-pronoun-resolution-statistics-based/)
- [A Twin-Candidate Model of Coreference Resolution with Non-Anaphor Identification Capability](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yang-2005-twin-candidate-model-coreference-resolution/)
- [Identification and Resolution of Chinese Zero Pronouns: A Machine Learning Approach](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhao-2007-identification-resolution-chinese-zero-pronouns/)
- [Context-Sensitive Convolution Tree Kernel for Pronoun Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhou-2008-context-sensitive-convolution-tree-kernel/)
- [Global Learning of Noun Phrase Anaphoricity in Coreference Resolution via Label Propagation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhou-2009-global-learning-noun-phrase-anaphoricity/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{yang2003coreference,
  title = {{Coreference Resolution Using Competition Learning Approach}},
  author = {Yang, Xiaofeng and Zhou, Guodong and Su, Jian and Tan, Chew Lim},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2003},
  doi = {10.3115/1075096.1075119},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1075096.1075119}
}
```

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## References

18 references, 9 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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