Coreference resolution is the task of clustering together multiple mentions of the same entity appearing in a textual document (e.g. Joe Biden, the U.S. President and he). This CodaLab-powered shared task deals with multilingual coreference resolution and is associated with the CRAC 2023 Workshop (the Sixth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference) held at EMNLP 2023.
The following table shows four versions of the CoNLL metric macro-averaged over all datasets:
A more detailed evaluation will be provided in the shared task overview paper.
system | head-match | partial-match | exact-match | with singletons |
---|---|---|---|---|
1. CorPipe | 74.90 | 73.33 | 71.46 | 76.82 |
2. Anonymous | 70.41 | 69.23 | 67.09 | 73.20 |
3. Ondfa | 69.19 | 68.93 | 53.01 | 68.37 |
4. McGill | 65.43 | 64.56 | 63.13 | 68.23 |
5. DeepBlueAI | 62.29 | 61.32 | 59.95 | 54.51 |
6. DFKI-Adapt | 61.86 | 60.83 | 59.18 | 53.94 |
7. Morfbase | 59.53 | 58.49 | 56.89 | 52.07 |
8. BASELINE | 56.96 | 56.28 | 54.75 | 49.32 |
9. DFKI-MPrompt | 53.76 | 51.62 | 50.42 | 46.83 |
Recently, inspired by the Universal Dependencies initiative (UD) [1], the coreference community has started discussions on establishing a universal annotation scheme and using it to harmonize existing corpora. The discussions at the CRAC 2020 workshop led to proposing the Universal Anaphora initiative. One of the lines of effort related to Universal Anaphora resulted in CorefUD, which is a multilingual collection of coreference data resources harmonized under a common scheme [2]. The current public edition of CorefUD 1.1 contains 17 datasets for 12 languages, namely Catalan, Czech (2×), English (2×), French, German (2×), Hungarian (2×), Lithuanian, Norwegian (2×), Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. The CRAC 2023 shared task deals with coreference resolution in all these languages. It is the 2nd edition of the shared task; findings of the first edition can be found in [8].
The file format used in CorefUD 1.1 represents coreference using the bracketing notation inspired by the CoNLL-2011 and CoNLL-2012 shared tasks [3], and inserts it into the MISC column of the CoNLL-U, the file format used in UD. The content of the other columns is fully compatible with morphological and syntactic annotations of the UD framework in CorefUD (with, for instance, automatically parsed trees added to resources that miss manual syntactic annotations). Thus, the shared task participant can easily employ UD-style morphosyntactic features for coreference prediction for all resources in a unified way, if they want to (pilot studies of the relation between coreference and dependency syntax can be found in [4] and [5]).
The main rules of the CRAC 2023 shared task are the following:
Even if all datasets included in the shared task are available in the same file format, systems competing in the shared task are supposed to be flexible enough to accommodate various types of variablity present in the CorefUD collection, such as
Charles University (Prague, Czechia): Anna Nedoluzhko, Michal Novák, Martin Popel, Zdeněk Žabokrtský, Daniel Zeman
Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw, Poland): Maciej Ogrodniczuk
University of West Bohemia (Pilsen, Czechia): Miloslav Konopík, Ondřej Pražák, Jakub Sido
If you are interested in participating in this shared task, please fill the registration form as soon as possible.
Technically, this registration will not be connected with participants' CodaLab accounts in any way. In other words, it will be possible to upload your CodaLab submissions without being registered here. However, we strongly recommend that at least one person from each participating team fills this registration form so that we can keep you informed about all updates regarding the shared task.
In addition, you can send any questions about the shared task to the organizers via corefud@googlegroups.com.
This shared task is supported by the Grants No. 20-16819X (LUSyD) of the Czech Science Foundation, and LM2018101 (LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ) of the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports of the Czech Republic.
The public edition of CorefUD 1.1 data is used in this shared task, both for training and evaluation purposes. CorefUD 1.1 is a collection of previously existing datasets annotated with coreference, converted into a common annotation scheme. The datasets are enriched with automatic morphological and syntactic annotations that are fully compliant with the standards of the Universal Dependencies project. All the datasets are stored in the CoNLL-U format, with coreference-specific information captured in the MISC column.
The public edition of CorefUD 1.1 contains 17 datasets for 12 languages, labeled as follows:
(There is also a non-public edition of CorefUD 1.1, containing 4 more datasets, however, they cannot be used for this shared task purposes because of their license limitations.)
The full specification of the CoNLL-U format is available at the website of Universal Dependencies. In a nutshell: every token has its own line; lines starting with #
are sentence-level comments, and empty lines terminate a sentence. Regular token lines start with an integer number. There are also lines starting with intervals (e.g. 4-5
), which introduce what UD calls “multi-word tokens”; these lines must be preserved in the output but otherwise the participants do not have to care about them (coreference annotation does not occur on them). Finally, there are also lines starting with decimal numbers (e.g. 2.1
), which correspond to empty nodes in the dependency graph; these nodes may represent zero mentions and may contain coreference annotation. Every token/node line contains 10 tab-separated fields (columns). The first column is the numeric ID of the token/node, the next column contains the word FORM; any coreference annotation, if present, will appear in the last column, which is called MISC. The file must use Linux-style line breaks, that is, a single LF character, rather than CR LF, which is common on Windows.
The MISC column is either a single underscore (_
), meaning there is no extra annotation, or one or more pieces of annotation (typically in the Attribute=Value
form), separated by vertical bars (|
). The annotation pieces relevant for this shared task always start with Entity=
; these should be learned from the training data and predicted for the test data. Any other annotation that is present in the MISC column of the input file should be preserved in the output (especially note that if you discard SpaceAfter=No
, or introduce a new one, the validator may report the file as invalid).
For more information on the Entity
attribute, see the PDF with the description of the CorefUD 1.0 format (the CorefUD 1.1 format is identical).
Example:
# global.Entity = eid-etype-head-minspan-infstat-link-identity # sent_id = GUM_academic_art-3 # text = Claire Bailey-Ross xxx@port.ac.uk University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom 1 Claire Claire PROPN NNP Number=Sing 0 root 0:root Entity=(e5-person-1-1,2,4-new-coref|Discourse=attribution:3->57:7 2 Bailey Bailey PROPN NNP Number=Sing 1 flat 1:flat SpaceAfter=No 3 - - PUNCT HYPH _ 4 punct 4:punct SpaceAfter=No 4 Ross Ross PROPN NNP Number=Sing 2 flat 2:flat Entity=e5) 5 xxx@port.ac.uk xxx@port.ac.uk PROPN NNP Number=Sing 1 list 1:list Entity=(e6-abstract-1-1-new-sgl) 6 University university NOUN NNP Number=Sing 1 list 1:list Entity=(e7-organization-1-3,5,6-new-sgl-University_of_Portsmouth 7 of of ADP IN _ 8 case 8:case _ 8 Portsmouth Portsmouth PROPN NNP Number=Sing 6 nmod 6:nmod:of Entity=(e8-place-1-3,4-new-sgl-Portsmouth|SpaceAfter=No 9 , , PUNCT , _ 11 punct 11:punct _ 10 United unite VERB NNP Tense=Past|VerbForm=Part 11 amod 11:amod Entity=(e9-place-2-1,2-new-coref-United_Kingdom 11 Kingdom kingdom NOUN NNP Number=Sing 1 list 1:list Entity=e9)e8)e7)
Each CorefUD dataset is divided into a training section, a development section, and a test section (train/dev/test for short). Technically, each CorefUD dataset consists of three CoNLL-U files containing disjoint sets of documents; boundaries between the three sections can be placed only on document boundaries.
Training and development files containing gold coreference annotations are identical to the CoNLL-U files available in CorefUD 1.1 (the link leads to the LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ repository where the data can be downloaded from). In addition, the development set with gold coreference annotation stripped off and original morpho-syntax features replaced by the output of UDPipe 2 (a pipeline for an automatic UD-like annotation) is available for download (blind dev set). It might be useful for development purposes.
Test sets without gold coreference annotations are available to participants since the beginning of the evaluation phase. In these data sets, the original morpho-syntax features are again replaced by the output of UDPipe 2. Test data with gold coreference annotation will be used internally in CodaLab for evaluation of submissions.
Submissions of all participant on the dev set were published after the shared task.
The official scorer for the shared task is corefud-scorer.py.
Run the following command to calculate the primary score (CoNLL score) that will be used to rank the submissions (KEY_FILE is the file with gold annotations, RESPONSE_FILE is the file with your predictions):
python corefud-scorer.py KEY_FILE RESPONSE_FILE
The main evaluation metric for the task is the CoNLL score, which is an unweighted average of the F1 values of MUC, B-cubed, and CEAFe scores. To encourage the participants to develop multilingual systems, the primary ranking score will be computed by macro-averaging CoNLL F1 scores over all datasets.
For the same reason, singletons (entities with a single mention) will not be taken into account in calculation of the primary score, as many of the datasets do not have singletons annotated.
Although some of the datasets also comprise annotation of split antecedents, bridging and other anaphoric relations, these are not going to be evaluated.
Besides the primary ranking, the overview paper on the shared task will also introduce multiple secondary rankings, e.g. by CoNLL score for individual languages, or by CoNLL scores calculated with exact matching.
The primary score is calculated using the head match. That is, to compare gold and predicted mentions, we compare their heads. Submitted systems are thus expected to predict a mention head word by filling in its relative position within all words in the corresponding mention span to the Entity
attribute. For example, the annotation Entity=(e9-place-2-
identifies the second word of the mention as its head. Note that this differs from the previous edition of the shared task, where we used partial matching, which ignored any setting of heads of predicted mentions during evaluation. Partial matching led several teams to optimize their predicted mentions by reducing them to their syntactic heads, thereby losing the information about full mention spans. This is something we want to avoid, while at the same time preventing methods as strict as exact matching.
However, it is still advisable to predict full mention spans, too. Evaluation with head matching uses them to disambiguate between mentions with the same head token. In addition, systems that predict only mention heads are likely to fail in the evaluation with exact matching, which will be calculated as one of the supplementary scores.
If the submitted system is not able to predict the mention heads (i.e. it predicts mention spans only, and the head index is always 1
), mention heads can be estimated using the provided dependency tree and heuristics, e.g. the ones provided by Udapi (see below), using the following command: udapy -s corefud.MoveHead < in.conllu > out.conllu
In a typical case, shared task participants should proceed as follows.
In the development phase (Phase 1):
The zip file uploaded to CodaLab must contain the following 17 files (without any other files or subdirectories):
ca_ancora-corefud-dev.conllu cs_pcedt-corefud-dev.conllu cs_pdt-corefud-dev.conllu de_parcorfull-corefud-dev.conllu de_potsdamcc-corefud-dev.conllu en_gum-corefud-dev.conllu en_parcorfull-corefud-dev.conllu es_ancora-corefud-dev.conllu fr_democrat-corefud-dev.conllu hu_szegedkoref-corefud-dev.conllu hu_korkor-corefud-dev.conllu lt_lcc-corefud-dev.conllu no_bokmaalnarc-corefud-dev.conllu no_nynorsknarc-corefud-dev.conllu pl_pcc-corefud-dev.conllu ru_rucor-corefud-dev.conllu tr_itcc-corefud-dev.conllu
In the evaluation phase (Phase 2):
Let us emphasize that even if multiple submissions are possible within the evaluation phase, their number is limited, they are allowed rather because of resolving some unexpected situations, but definitely should not be used for systematic optimization of parameters or hyperparameters of your model towards the scores shown by CodaLab.
Participants who have developed multiple coreference prediction systems are encouraged to submit their predictions separately, up to 3 systems per team, as long as the systems are different in some interesting ways (e.g. using different architectures, not just different hyperparameter settings). In order to submit an additional system of yours, please create an additional team account at CodaLab.
Many things can go wrong when filling the predicted coreference annotation in the CoNLL-U format (incorrect syntax in the MISC column, unmatched brackets etc.) It is highly recommended to always check validity prior to submitting the files, so that you do not run out of the maximum daily (2) and total submission (10) trials specified for the shared task.
That said, even files not passing the validation tests will be considered for the evaluation and contributing to the final score (provided the evaluation script does not fail on such files).
There are two basic requirements for each submitted CoNLL-U file:
The official UD validator will be used to check the validity of the CoNLL-U format. Anyone can obtain it by cloning the UD tools repository from Github and running the script validate.py
. Python 3 is needed to run the script (depending on your system, it may be available under the command python
or python3
; if in doubt, try python -V
to see the version).
$ git clone git@github.com:UniversalDependencies/tools.git $ cd tools $ python3 validate.py -h
In addition, a third-party module called regex
must be installed via pip. Try this if you do not have the module already:
$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip; python3 -m pip install regex
The validation script distinguishes several levels of validity; level 2 is sufficient in the shared task, as the higher levels deal with morphosyntactic requirements on the UD-released treebanks. On the other hand, we will use the --coref
option to turn on tests specific to coreference annotation. The validator also requires the option --lang xx
where xx
is the ISO language code of the data set.
$ python3 validate.py --level 2 --coref --lang cs cs_pdt-corefud-test.conllu *** PASSED ***
If there are errors, the script will print messages describing the location and the nature of the error, it will print *** FAILED *** with (number of) errors
, and it will return a non-zero exit value. If the file is OK, the script will print *** PASSED ***
and return zero as its exit value. The script may also print warning messages that point to potential problems in the file but are not considered errors and will not make the file invalid.
The baseline system is based on the multilingual coreference resolution system presented in [7]. The model uses multilingual BERT in the end-to-end setting. In simple words, the model goes through all potential spans and maximizes the probability of gold antecedents for each span. The same system is used for all the languages. More details can be found in [7].
The simplified system adapted to CorefUD 1.0, is publically available on GitHub along with tagged dev data and its dev data results.
Files with coreference predicted by the baseline system can be downloaded directly as zip files dev set and test set, so you do not have to run the baseline system yourself and can only try to improve its outputs. The zip files structure is identical to what will be expected by the CodaLab submission system. The files with baseline predictions were post-processed by Udapi to make them pass the pre-submission validation tests: udapy -s read.Conllu split_docs=1 corefud.MergeSameSpan corefud.IndexClusters < orig.conllu > fixed.conllu
Udapi is a Python API for reading, writing, querying and editing Universal Dependencies data in the CoNLL-U format (and several other formats). Newly, it has support for the coreference annotations (and it was used for producing CorefUD). Even if you decide not to build your system by extending the baseline system, you can use Udapi for accessing the CorefUD data in a comfortable way. For getting an insight into Udapi, you can use
All shared task participants are invited to submit their system descriptions papers to the CRAC 2023 Workshop.
System description papers can have the form of long or short research papers, up to 8 pages of content for long papers and up to 4 pages of content for short papers, plus an unlimited number of pages for references in both cases.
Identity of the authors of the participanting systems is known, and thus there is no reason for making the submissions anonymous.
Training, development, and test datasets are subject to license agreements specified individually for each dataset in the public edition of the CorefUD 1.1 collection (which, in turn, are the same as license agreements of the original resources before CorefUD harmonization). In all cases, the licenses are sufficient for using the data for the CRAC 2023 shared task purposes. However, the participants must check the license agreements in case they want to use their trained models also for other purposes; for instance, usage for commercial purposes is prohibited with several CorefUD datasets as they are available under CC BY-NC-SA.
Whenever using the CorefUD 1.1 collection (inside or outside this shared task), please cite it as follows:
@misc{11234/1-4698, title = {Coreference in Universal Dependencies 1.1 ({CorefUD} 1.1)}, author = { Nov{\' a}k, Michal and Popel, Martin and {\v Z}abokrtsk{\'y}, Zden{\v e}k and Zeman, Daniel and Nedoluzhko, Anna and Acar, Kutay and Bourgonje, Peter and Cinkov{\' a}, Silvie and Cebiro{\v{g}}lu Eryi{\v{g}}it, G{\"u}l{\c{s}}en and Haji{\v c}, Jan and Hardmeier, Christian and Haug, Dag and J{\o}rgensen, Tollef and K{\aa}sen, Andre and Krielke, Pauline and Landragin, Fr{\'e}d{\'e}ric and Lapshinova-Koltunski, Ekaterina and M{\ae}hlum, Petter and Mart{\'{\i}}, M.Ant{\`o}nia and Mikulov{\' a}, Marie and N{\o}klestad, Anders and Ogrodniczuk, Maciej and {\O}vrelid, Lilja and Pamay Arslan, Tu{\v{g}}ba and Recasens, Marta and Solberg, Per Erik and Stede, Manfred and Straka, Milan and Toldova, Svetlana and Vadász, No{\' e}mi and Velldal, Erik and Vincze, Veronika and Zeldes, Amir and {\v Z}itkus, Voldemaras}, url = {http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-5053}, note = {{LINDAT}/{CLARIAH}-{CZ} digital library at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics ({{\'U}FAL}), Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University}, year = {2022} }
For a more general reference to CorefUD harmonization efforts, please cite the following LREC paper:
@inproceedings{biblio8283899234757555533, author = {Anna Nedoluzhko and Michal Novák and Martin Popel and Zdeněk Žabokrtský and Amir Zeldes and Daniel Zeman}, year = 2022, title = {CorefUD 1.0: Coreference Meets Universal Dependencies}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022)}, pages = {4859--4872}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association}, address = {Marseille, France}, isbn = {979-10-95546-72-6}, }
By submitting results to this competition, the participants consent to the public release of their scores at the CRAC 2023 workshop and in the associated proceedings, at the task organizers' discretion. Participants further agree that the task organizers are under no obligation to release scores and that scores may be withheld if it is the task organizers' judgment that the submission was erroneous or deceptive.