---
title: "Coreference or Not — Luo 2007"
description: "The paper tackles a frequently neglected part of coreference resolution: deciding when a mention has no antecedent at all, either because it is…"
authors: ["Xiaoqiang Luo"]
year: 2007
venue: "Human Language Technologies 2007: The Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics; Proceedings of the Main Conference"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/N07-1010/"
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/luo-2007-coreference-or-not-twin-model/"
---
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# Coreference or Not: A Twin Model for Coreference Resolution

**Authors:** [Xiaoqiang Luo](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/xiaoqiang-luo/) · **Year:** 2007 · **Venue:** Human Language Technologies 2007: The Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics; Proceedings of the Main Conference · **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/N07-1010/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/N07-1010.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W118352988)

**Citations:** 22 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [12](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper tackles a frequently neglected part of coreference resolution: deciding when a mention has no antecedent at all, either because it is discourse-new or because it opens a new coreference chain. Earlier systems handled this by rejecting candidates whose best link score fell under a manually tuned threshold, or by training a separate anaphoricity classifier. Luo instead proposes a twin model with two jointly trained maximum-entropy (MaxEnt) components. The link model scores whether a mention belongs to a given entity. The creation model scores the probability that the mention starts a new entity. Because the creation decision depends on every preceding entity, its features would be costly to compute directly. The author therefore restricts feature forms so that creation features can be built from link-model feature values. Decoding is a beam search over a Bell Tree. On ACE 2005 data, the twin model matches or beats a thresholding baseline on both ACE-Value and entity F-measure without any free parameter to tune. This makes the approach easier to carry across tasks and datasets.

## Key points
- Each step of the coreference process either links the current mention to an existing entity, scored by the link model P_l, or creates a new entity, scored by the creation model P_c. A full outcome's score is the product of the scores of its steps.
- Mentions are processed in a fixed order: names first, then nominals, then pronouns. The search uses a Bell Tree with a beam of about 20 hypotheses and a relative pruning threshold of 10⁻⁵.
- Unlike the starting model of Luo et al. (2004), which reused link scores in an ad-hoc way, the creation model here is fully trained. Unlike the anaphoricity classifiers of Ng and Cardie (2002a) and Ng (2004), it is trained together with the link model.
- The best baseline threshold depends on the evaluation metric. θ=0.3 is best for entity F-measure (84.7 F, 87.5 ACE-Value), while θ=0.5 is best for ACE-Value (81.1 F, 88.0 ACE-Value).
- The twin model scores 84.8 entity F-measure and 88.4 ACE-Value, reaching the top result on both metrics at once with no threshold.

*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

12 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 7 of them have a page here, 5 not yet.

- [Dependency-driven Anaphoricity Determination for Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/kong-2010-dependency-driven-anaphoricity-determination-coreference/)
- [Graph-Cut-Based Anaphoricity Determination for Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ng-2009-graph-cut-based-anaphoricity-determination/)
- [Supervised Noun Phrase Coreference Research: The First Fifteen Years](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ng-2010-supervised-noun-phrase-coreference-research/)
- [A Global Relaxation Labeling Approach to Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/sapena-2010-global-relaxation-labeling-approach-coreference/)
- [A Constraint-Based Hypergraph Partitioning Approach to Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/sapena-2013-constraint-based-hypergraph-partitioning-approach/)
- [A Fully-Lexicalized Probabilistic Model for Japanese Zero Anaphora Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/sasano-2008-fully-lexicalized-probabilistic-model-japanese/)
- [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/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{luo2007coreference,
  title = {{Coreference or Not: A Twin Model for Coreference Resolution}},
  author = {Luo, Xiaoqiang},
  booktitle = {Human Language Technologies 2007: The Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics; Proceedings of the Main Conference},
  year = {2007},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/N07-1010/}
}
```

- [← previous Chinese Syntactic Reordering for Statistical Machine Translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/wang-2007-chinese-syntactic-reordering-statistical-machine/)
- [next → Coreference Resolution Using Semantic Relatedness Information from Automatically Discovered Patterns](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/yang-2007-coreference-resolution-semantic-relatedness-information/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2007](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2007/)

## References

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

1. David L. Bean and Ellen Riloff. 1999. Corpus-based identification of non-anaphoric noun phrases. In Proc. ACL. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=David+L%2E+Bean+and+Ellen+Riloff%2E+1999%2E+Corpus%2Dbased+identification+of+non%2Danaphoric+noun+phrases%2E+In+Proc%2E+ACL%2E) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/bean-1999-corpus-based-identification-non-anaphoric/)
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13. Cristina Nicolae and Gabriel Nicolae. 2006. BEST-CUT: A graph algorithm for coreference resolution. In Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 275–283, Sydney, Australia, July. Association for Computational Linguistics. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Cristina+Nicolae+and+Gabriel+Nicolae%2E+2006%2E+BEST%2DCUT%3A+A+graph+algorithm+for+coreference+resolution%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+2006+Conference+on+Empirical+Methods+in+Natural+Language+Processing%2C+pages+275)
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16. Wee Meng Soon, Hwee Tou Ng, and Chung Yong Lim. 2001. A machine learning approach to coreference resolution of noun phrases. Computational Linguistics, 27(4):521–544. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Wee+Meng+Soon%2C+Hwee+Tou+Ng%2C+and+Chung+Yong+Lim%2E+2001%2E+A+machine+learning+approach+to+coreference+resolution+of+noun+phrases%2E+Computational+Linguistics%2C+27%284%29%3A521%E2%80%93544%2E) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/soon-2001-machine-learning-approach-coreference-resolution/)
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