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# Using Automatically Extracted Minimum Spans to Disentangle Coreference Evaluation from Boundary Detection

**Authors:** [Nafise Sadat Moosavi](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/nafise-sadat-moosavi/), [Leo Born](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/leo-born/), [Massimo Poesio](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/massimo-poesio/), [Michael Strube](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/michael-strube/) · **Year:** 2019 · **Venue:** ACL 2019 **Link:** [aclanthology.org/P19-1408](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1408/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[**4** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2949379826) openalex · 2026-10-18[**16** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/moosavi-2019-automatically-extracted-minimum-spans-disentangle/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/P19-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1408/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P19-1408.pdf)
- [DOI 10.18653/v1/p19-1408](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-1408)
- [arXiv 1906.06703](https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.06703)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2949379826)

**Authors (4)**

1. [Nafise Sadat Moosavi](https://openalex.org/A5054918343) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8332-307X) · h 12 · 717 citations · 92 works
2. [Leo Born](https://openalex.org/A5017632073) h 4 · 51 citations · 13 works
3. [Massimo Poesio](https://openalex.org/A5047065550) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8469-2072) · h 47 · 10176 citations · 588 works
4. [Michael Strube](https://openalex.org/A5020347604) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4731-8142) · h 74 · 20807 citations · 485 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-18); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

Scoring coreference by maximum spans mixes coreference errors with boundary errors such as PP attachment: «an extensive presence» and «an extensive presence, of course in this country» count as different mentions, and the system is penalised as if it had linked the wrong thing. MUC, ACE and ARRAU annotate minimum spans by hand, CoNLL-2012 does not. MINA extracts a minimum span automatically from one constituency tree: walk the mention's subtree breadth-first through NP-internal nodes and keep the shallowest terminal nodes that contain a word other than a determiner or conjunction (so a name keeps all its words, unlike a single head word, which makes «Mary Green» and «John Green» both «Green»). Gold and system mentions are reduced on the same tree and compared by their minimum spans. MINA spans agree with expert minimum spans better than head words, and minimum-span scores reduce the effect of parser differences on system rankings.

## Ideas

- I1. Add a minimum-span matching mode to `coref/src/score.rs` next to the head mode and the exact-span mode, defined on UD: the head plus its `flat`, `fixed` and name-internal `compound` dependents (and for a coordination, each conjunct's minimum span). This keeps head-based robustness to attachment errors but separates «George W. Bush» from «George H. W. Bush», which head matching merges. Report CoNLL F1 on GUM dev under all three modes; the difference to head mode measures how much name-internal confusion the head scorer hides.
- I2. Use the same minimum span inside the `proper_head` and `exact`/`strict_*` sieves (`coref/src/sieve.rs`): two proper-name mentions link only if their minimum spans are compatible (one contains the other's full name words) — a direct attack on the «[George W.] Bush ~ [George H. W.] Bush» error listed in [coref — SLM coreference: a sieve of rules with a reason for every link](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/coref/). Measure `proper_head` and `strict_a` precision on GUM dev.
- I3. Use minimum-span scoring when comparing gold-tree and SLM-tree runs: part of the 6-point loss on SLM trees is boundary detection (e.g. reference numbers parsed as appositions), and minimum spans separate that from real linking loss.

## For Mova

[35. Reference and coreference](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/35-reference-and-coreference/) §7 (annotating coreference), §9.3. Code: `coref/src/score.rs` (matching mode), `coref/src/sieve.rs`, `coref/src/mention.rs`. Measures: CoNLL F1 on GUM dev in three matching modes, gold vs SLM trees; precision of name sieves.

Topics: [Coreference resolution](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/coreference-resolution/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.18653/v1/p19-1408](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-1408) · [arXiv 1906.06703](https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.06703)

```
@inproceedings{moosavi2019using,
  title = {{Using Automatically Extracted Minimum Spans to Disentangle Coreference Evaluation from Boundary Detection}},
  author = {Moosavi, Nafise Sadat and Born, Leo and Poesio, Massimo and Strube, Michael},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/p19-1408},
  eprint = {1906.06703},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-1408}
}
```

- [← previous Using Linguistic Features to Improve the Generalization Capability of Neural Coreference Resolvers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/moosavi-2018-linguistic-features-improve-generalization-capability/)
- [next → How much progress have we made on RST discourse parsing? A replication study of recent results on the RST-DT](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/morey-2017-how-much-progress-have-we/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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