---
title: "Unsupervised Learning of Contextual Role — Bean 2004"
description: "The paper addresses coreference resolution, specifically choosing the right antecedent when an anaphor's own features, such as lexical match or…"
authors: ["David Bean", "Ellen Riloff"]
year: 2004
venue: "Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: HLT-NAACL 2004"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/N04-1038/"
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/papers/bean-2004-unsupervised-learning-contextual-role-knowledge/"
---
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# Unsupervised Learning of Contextual Role Knowledge for Coreference Resolution

**Authors:** David Bean, [Ellen Riloff](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/ellen-riloff/) · **Year:** 2004 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: HLT-NAACL 2004 · **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/N04-1038/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/N04-1038.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2109286446)

**Citations:** 80 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [38](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper addresses coreference resolution, specifically choosing the right antecedent when an anaphor's own features, such as lexical match or agreement, are not enough. The authors argue that the role a noun phrase plays in an event (for example, kidnapper versus victim) is a strong clue. They present BABAR, a resolver that learns this contextual role knowledge from raw text without annotations. BABAR first gathers training pairs using lexical and syntactic heuristics that resolve easy cases reliably. It then runs AutoSlog to produce extraction patterns, which it normalizes into agent/patient "caseframes." From co-occurrence statistics over these pairs, it builds four contextual role knowledge sources. A Dempster-Shafer model combines their evidence with seven general knowledge sources. Experiments used the MUC-4 terrorism corpus and Reuters natural-disaster texts. The contextual knowledge raised F-measure in both domains, mainly by improving pronoun recall, while definite NPs barely changed. The authors conclude that pronoun resolution relies chiefly on context, whereas definite NP resolution relies more on the meaning of the noun itself.

## Key points
- Automatically generated training resolutions: 5,078 for terrorism (2,386 lexical seeding, 2,692 syntactic seeding) and 20,479 for disasters (11,652 lexical, 8,827 syntactic).
- Syntactic seeding uses seven heuristics, including reflexive and relative pronouns, appositives, and "NP said it/they" constructions. Lexical seeding links matching proper names and repeated existential definite NPs such as "the FBI."
- The four contextual role knowledge sources are the Caseframe Network (CFNet), Lexical Caseframe Expectations (CFLex), and two semantic caseframe sources (CFSem-CFSem and WordSem-CFSem). Using all of them together worked best.
- Pronoun recall improved by 13 points in terrorism and 15 points in disasters. Pronoun F rose from .59 to .68 for terrorism and from .56 to .66 for disasters.
- For definite NPs, the gains were negligible: F went from .55 to .55 for terrorism and from .58 to .59 for disasters.

*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/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [Coreference resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/coreference-resolution/)

## Cited by

Cited by

38 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 16 of them have a page here, 22 not yet.

- [Integrating Deep Event-Level and Script-Level Information for Script Event Prediction](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/bai-2021-integrating-deep-event-level-script/)
- [Bootstrapping Path-Based Pronoun Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/bergsma-2006-bootstrapping-path-based-pronoun-resolution/)
- [An Expectation Maximization Approach to Pronoun Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/cherry-2005-expectation-maximization-approach-pronoun-resolution/)
- [Entity-Centric Coreference Resolution with Model Stacking](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/clark-2015-entity-centric-coreference-resolution-model/)
- [The KnowRef Coreference Corpus: Removing Gender and Number Cues for Difficult Pronominal Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/emami-2019-knowref-coreference-corpus-removing-gender/)
- [Intra-sentential Zero Anaphora Resolution using Subject Sharing Recognition](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/iida-2015-intra-sentential-zero-anaphora-resolution/)
- [Using Semantic Relations to Refine Coreference Decisions](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ji-2005-semantic-relations-refine-coreference-decisions/)
- [Machine Learning for Coreference Resolution: From Local Classification to Global Ranking](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ng-2005-machine-learning-coreference-resolution-local/)
- [Semantic Class Induction and Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ng-2007-semantic-class-induction-coreference-resolution/)
- [Supervised Noun Phrase Coreference Research: The First Fifteen Years](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ng-2010-supervised-noun-phrase-coreference-research/)
- [Coreference Resolution with World Knowledge](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/rahman-2011-coreference-resolution-world-knowledge/)
- [A Constraint-Based Hypergraph Partitioning Approach to Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/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/papers/stoyanov-2009-conundrums-noun-phrase-coreference-resolution/)
- [Mind the GAP: A Balanced Corpus of Gendered Ambiguous Pronouns](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/webster-2018-mind-gap-balanced-corpus-gendered/)
- [Improving Pronoun Resolution Using Statistics-Based Semantic Compatibility Information](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/yang-2005-improving-pronoun-resolution-statistics-based/)
- [Coreference Resolution Using Semantic Relatedness Information from Automatically Discovered Patterns](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/yang-2007-coreference-resolution-semantic-relatedness-information/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{bean2004unsupervised,
  title = {{Unsupervised Learning of Contextual Role Knowledge for Coreference Resolution}},
  author = {Bean, David and Riloff, Ellen},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: HLT-NAACL 2004},
  year = {2004},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/N04-1038/}
}
```

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