--- title: "Using Coreference Links to Improve — Werlen 2017" description: "The paper asks whether document-level coreference information can improve Spanish-to-English statistical machine translation, especially for pronouns." authors: ["Lesly Miculicich Werlen", "Andrei Popescu-Belis"] year: 2017 venue: "Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Coreference Resolution Beyond OntoNotes (CORBON 2017)" source: "https://aclanthology.org/W17-1505/" doi: "10.18653/v1/w17-1505" 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/werlen-2017-coreference-links-improve-spanish-english/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/werlen-2017-coreference-links-improve-spanish-english/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/) / [2017](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2017/page/3/) / Using Coreference Links to Improve Spanish-to-English Machine Translation # Using Coreference Links to Improve Spanish-to-English Machine Translation **Authors:** [Lesly Miculicich Werlen](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/lesly-miculicich-werlen/), [Andrei Popescu-Belis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/andrei-popescu-belis/) · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Coreference Resolution Beyond OntoNotes (CORBON 2017) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W17-1505/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W17-1505.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/w17-1505](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w17-1505) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2590685008) **Citations:** 11 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [13](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary The paper asks whether document-level coreference information can improve Spanish-to-English statistical machine translation, especially for pronouns. Spanish is pro-drop, so the system must sometimes create English pronouns from null subjects. The guiding idea is that a good translation should preserve the source text's grouping of mentions into entities. Source-side links come from the gold annotation of the AnCora-ES corpus, which serves only as test data. Target-side links are computed automatically with the Stanford Statistical Coreference Resolution system. The authors test two strategies: - **Re-ranking:** target mentions are projected onto source mentions and compared with standard coreference metrics (MUC, B3, CEAF). The resulting similarity is used to rescore Moses translation hypotheses. - **Post-editing:** because the top hypotheses rarely differ in their mentions, this method combines pairwise coreference scores with MT scores and revises each mention individually. Post-editing clearly improved pronoun accuracy while BLEU stayed essentially unchanged. Re-ranking helped pronouns but lowered overall and noun translation quality. This is presented as the first proof-of-concept that coreference links can measurably benefit statistical MT. ## Key points - Resources: AnCora-ES with gold coreference (source side, test only), Stanford CoreNLP coreference and its pairwise classifier (target side), and a Moses phrase-based baseline. - Sanity check: on about 3.5k words, coreference similarity followed translation quality. The ranking was human translation, then commercial neural MT (BLEU 49.4), then the baseline (BLEU 43.7). - Evaluation used BLEU for overall quality, APT for pronouns and ANT for nouns. Post-editing raised APT significantly with no significant change in BLEU or ANT. - Manual evaluation covered four documents, nouns and pronouns together: | System | Wrong mentions | Total score | |---|---|---| | Baseline | 53 | 251 | | Re-ranking | 55 | 249 | | Post-editing | 21 | 308 | - The largest gains were for third-person personal and possessive pronouns, plus some Spanish null pronouns. *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/) · [Machine translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/machine-translation/) ## Cited by Cited by 13 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 4 of them have a page here, 9 not yet. - [Word-Level Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/dobrovolskii-2021-word-level-coreference-resolution/) - [Document-Level Neural Machine Translation with Hierarchical Attention Networks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/miculicich-2018-document-level-neural-machine-translation/) - [Neural Machine Translation Doesn't Translate Gender Coreference Right Unless You Make It](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/saunders-2020-neural-machine-translation-doesn-t/) - [Deep Cross-Lingual Coreference Resolution for Less-Resourced Languages: The Case of Basque](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/urbizu-2019-deep-cross-lingual-coreference-resolution/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{werlen2017using, title = {{Using Coreference Links to Improve Spanish-to-English Machine Translation}}, author = {Werlen, Lesly Miculicich and Popescu-Belis, Andrei}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Coreference Resolution Beyond OntoNotes (CORBON 2017)}, year = {2017}, doi = {10.18653/v1/w17-1505}, url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w17-1505} } ``` - [← previous Using Context Information for Dialog Act Classification in DNN Framework](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/liu-2017-context-information-dialog-act-classification/) - [next → Using Electronic Dictionaries and NooJ to Generate Sentences Containing English Phrasal Verbs](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/machonis-2017-electronic-dictionaries-nooj-generate-sentences/) - [↑ back to papers of 2017](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2017/page/3/) ## References 3 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Amit Bagga and Breck Baldwin. 1998. Algorithms for scoring coreference chains. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation Workshop on Linguistics Coreference, volume 1, pages 563–566, Granada, Spain. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Amit+Bagga+and+Breck+Baldwin%2E+1998%2E+Algorithms+for+scoring+coreference+chains%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+First+International+Conference+on+Language+Resources+and+Evaluation+Workshop+on+Linguistics+Corefer) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/bagga-1998-algorithms-scoring-coreference-chains/) 2. Dzmitry Bahdanau, Kyunghyun Cho, and Yoshua Bengio. 2015. Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), San Diego, USA. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Dzmitry+Bahdanau%2C+Kyunghyun+Cho%2C+and+Yoshua+Bengio%2E+2015%2E+Neural+machine+translation+by+jointly+learning+to+align+and+translate%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+International+Conference+on+Learning+Representati) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/bahdanau-2014-neural-machine-translation-jointly-learning/) 3. Eric Bengtson and Dan Roth. 2008. Understanding the value of features for coreference resolution. In Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 294–303, Honolulu, Hawaii, October. Association for Computational Linguistics. *Table 5: Examples of sour… [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Eric+Bengtson+and+Dan+Roth%2E+2008%2E+Understanding+the+value+of+features+for+coreference+resolution%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+2008+Conference+on+Empirical+Methods+in+Natural+Language+Processing%2C+pages+294%E2%80%933) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/bengtson-2008-understanding-value-features-coreference-resolution/)