---
title: "Dependency-driven Anaphoricity Determination for — Kong 2010"
description: "Coreference systems waste effort and make errors when they search for antecedents of noun phrases that actually introduce new entities."
authors: ["Fang Kong", "Guodong Zhou", "Longhua Qian", "Qiaoming Zhu"]
year: 2010
venue: "Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/C10-1068/"
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/kong-2010-dependency-driven-anaphoricity-determination-coreference/"
---
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# Dependency-driven Anaphoricity Determination for Coreference Resolution

**Authors:** [Fang Kong](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/fang-kong/), [Guodong Zhou](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/guodong-zhou/), Longhua Qian, [Qiaoming Zhu](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/qiaoming-zhu/) · **Year:** 2010 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010) · **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/C10-1068/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/C10-1068.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2124934171)

**Citations:** 21 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · 8 in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Coreference systems waste effort and make errors when they search for antecedents of noun phrases that actually introduce new entities. Kong et al. address anaphoricity determination, which means deciding in advance whether a mention is anaphoric, with a tree kernel classifier over syntactic parses. Their main contribution is a way to prune the full parse tree around each mention. Guided by constituent dependencies seen from both syntactic and semantic angles, the method keeps the nodes and paths relevant to the mention and discards noisy material. The result is a dependency-driven dynamic syntactic parse tree (D-DSPT). On the ACE 2003 corpus, D-DSPT outperforms earlier tree structures on the anaphoricity task. When the resulting classifier is placed in front of a learning-based coreference resolver, F1 rises clearly in all three domains, giving the best reported results at the time. The study shows that carefully shaped structural input matters for kernel methods, and that an explicit anaphoricity filter can substantially help coreference resolution.

## Key points
- The D-DSPT module improves coreference F1 over a baseline without anaphoricity determination by 4.1, 3.9 and 5.0 points, reaching 63.2 (NWIRE), 67.4 (NPAPER) and 61.6 (BNEWS) on ACE 2003. The gains come mostly from higher precision with only a small loss in recall.
- Gold-standard anaphoricity would add 6.4, 6.1 and 7.0 F1 over the baseline. D-DSPT therefore still trails this upper bound by roughly 2 points per domain (2.3, 2.2, 2.0).
- Improvements appear for pronominal, definite and indefinite NPs. Proper NPs gain almost nothing because the baseline's abbreviation feature already handles them well.
- The system beats Zhou and Kong (2009), which used a dynamically-extended tree, by 1.4, 2.2 and 2.0 F1. It also outperforms Ng (2009), which used graph minimum cuts.
- The authors present this as the first work to exploit constituent dependencies directly in tree kernel-based anaphoricity determination. The approach builds on the convolution tree kernel and on the dynamic parse trees of Qian et al. (2008) for relation extraction.

*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/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{kong2010dependency,
  title = {{Dependency-driven Anaphoricity Determination for Coreference Resolution}},
  author = {Kong, Fang and Zhou, Guodong and Qian, Longhua and Zhu, Qiaoming},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling 2010)},
  year = {2010},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/C10-1068/}
}
```

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31 references, 14 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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