Towards Coreference for Literary Text: Analyzing Domain-Specific Phenomena

Abstract

Coreference resolution is the task of grouping together references to the same discourse entity. Resolving coreference in literary texts could benefit a number of Digital Humanities (DH) tasks, such as analyzing the depiction of characters and/or their relations. Domain-dependent training data has shown to improve coreference resolution for many domains, e.g. the biomedical domain, as its properties differ significantly from news text or dialogue, on which automatic systems are typically trained. Literary texts could also benefit from corpora annotated with coreference. We therefore analyze the specific properties of coreference-related phenomena on a number of texts and give directions for the adaptation of annotation guidelines. As some of the adaptations have profound impact, we also present a new annotation tool for coreference, with a focus on enabling annotation of long texts with many discourse entities.

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Reproductions