---
title: "FantasyCoref — Han 2021"
description: "Coreference systems are mostly built on non-fiction such as OntoNotes."
authors: ["Sooyoun Han", "Sumin Seo", "Minji Kang", "Jongin Kim", "Nayoung Choi", "Min Song", "Jinho D. Choi"]
year: 2021
venue: "Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2021.crac-1.3/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/2021.crac-1.3"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/han-2021-fantasycoref-coreference-resolution-fantasy-literature/"
---
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# FantasyCoref: Coreference Resolution on Fantasy Literature Through Omniscient Writer's Point of View

**Authors:** Sooyoun Han, Sumin Seo, Minji Kang, Jongin Kim, Nayoung Choi, Min Song, [Jinho D. Choi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/jinho-d-choi/) · **Year:** 2021 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2021.crac-1.3/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2021.crac-1.3.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/2021.crac-1.3](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.crac-1.3) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3212677975)

**Citations:** 2 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [7](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Coreference systems are mostly built on non-fiction such as OntoNotes. They struggle with fantasy stories, where characters disguise themselves, transform, receive prophecies, or are known by shifting names. The authors present FantasyCoref, an English corpus of 211 Grimms' Fairy Tales plus three further fantasy texts (two Arabian Nights tales and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), totalling about 368K tokens. Three linguists annotated it with CorefAnnotator, adapting the OntoNotes guidelines. Mentions are resolved from the omniscient writer's point of view (OWV): entities are linked according to what the author knows, not what any character or reader believes at a given moment. Four new guideline categories cover these genre-specific cases. A four-stage annotation process reached 87% inter-annotator agreement. Fine-tuning a state-of-the-art neural coreference model on FantasyCoref improved results over the OntoNotes-only model and reduced fiction-specific errors. Its best score of 76.88% still trails OntoNotes-level performance, so the resource points to a hard, underexplored domain relevant to reading comprehension.

## Key points
- **Corpus composition:** 211 Grimms' stories (GFT) plus a separate test set (AFT) of *Aladdin*, *Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves*, and *Alice's Adventures in Wonderland*, all from Project Gutenberg. The total is 367,891 tokens, and documents are about 2.5× longer than OntoNotes documents. The corpus is available at github.com/emorynlp/FantasyCoref.
- **Guideline categories:** The four categories handle lexical variations, wishes or foretelling, alterations to entities, and uneven knowledge between characters.
- **Genre comparison:** Knowledge asymmetry appears in 36.4% of the fantasy stories but only 2.0% of 100 sampled OntoNotes documents. For entity changes, the figures are 24.8% vs 1.0%.
- **Agreement:** IAA was measured with MUC, B³ and CEAF φ4 rather than Kappa, giving about 87%.
- **Model results:** Training on FantasyCoref yielded gains of 2.59 and 3.06 points over the OntoNotes-trained model. A 15-type error analysis showed fewer errors involving long distances, mistaken identities, plot twists and metamorphoses.

*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

7 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 4 not yet.

- [Lions: 1 and Tigers: 2 and Bears: 3, Oh My! Literary Coreference Annotation with LLMs](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/hicke-2024-lions-1-tigers-2-bears/)
- [Major Entity Identification: A Generalizable Alternative to Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/manikantan-2024-major-entity-identification-generalizable-alternative/)
- [Findings of the Fifth Shared Task on Multilingual Coreference Resolution: Expanding Datasets for Long-Range Entities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/novak-2026-findings-fifth-shared-task-multilingual/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{han2021fantasycoref,
  title = {{FantasyCoref: Coreference Resolution on Fantasy Literature Through Omniscient Writer's Point of View}},
  author = {Han, Sooyoun and Seo, Sumin and Kang, Minji and Kim, Jongin and Choi, Nayoung and Song, Min and Choi, Jinho D.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2021.crac-1.3},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.crac-1.3}
}
```

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