Multimodal Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution Using Linear Semantic Transfer and Mixed-Modality Ensembles

Abhijnan Nath, Huma Jamil, Shafiuddin Rehan Ahmed, George Arthur Baker, Rahul Ghosh, James H. Martin, Nathaniel Blanchard, Nikhil Krishnaswamy


Abstract
Event coreference resolution (ECR) is the task of determining whether distinct mentions of events within a multi-document corpus are actually linked to the same underlying occurrence. Images of the events can help facilitate resolution when language is ambiguous. Here, we propose a multimodal cross-document event coreference resolution method that integrates visual and textual cues with a simple linear map between vision and language models. As existing ECR benchmark datasets rarely provide images for all event mentions, we augment the popular ECB+ dataset with event-centric images scraped from the internet and generated using image diffusion models. We establish three methods that incorporate images and text for coreference: 1) a standard fused model with finetuning, 2) a novel linear mapping method without finetuning and 3) an ensembling approach based on splitting mention pairs by semantic and discourse-level difficulty. We evaluate on 2 datasets: the augmented ECB+, and AIDA Phase 1. Our ensemble systems using cross-modal linear mapping establish an upper limit (91.9 CoNLL F1) on ECB+ ECR performance given the preprocessing assumptions used, and establish a novel baseline on AIDA Phase 1. Our results demonstrate the utility of multimodal information in ECR for certain challenging coreference problems, and highlight a need for more multimodal resources in the coreference resolution space.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1039
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
11901–11916
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1039
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhijnan Nath, Huma Jamil, Shafiuddin Rehan Ahmed, George Arthur Baker, Rahul Ghosh, James H. Martin, Nathaniel Blanchard, and Nikhil Krishnaswamy. 2024. Multimodal Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution Using Linear Semantic Transfer and Mixed-Modality Ensembles. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 11901–11916, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Multimodal Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution Using Linear Semantic Transfer and Mixed-Modality Ensembles (Nath et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1039.pdf