# Coreference Resolution

Co-reference Resolution (CR) is the task of deciding whether two entity mentions refer to the same instance or not.

For example in:

> Joe Biden appeared at the event at 8pm. The president was wearing a Louis Vuitton Tuxedo.

The objective is to identify that Joe Biden and The president are the same entity.

Coreference Detection is related to [Relationship Extraction (RE)](https://wiki.jamesravey.me/books/ai-and-ml/page/relationship-extraction "Relationship Extraction") - in fact you could even say that CR is a special case of RE in the sense that we are interested in the special relationship between entity mentions when they both refer to the same entity.

### In-Document Coreference Resolution

This is the "normal" CR case in which you're trying to resolve mentions of entities within the same document e.g. a single news article.

#### Approaches

- **2022-10-23** [A recent blog post ](https://explosion.ai/blog/coref)from explosion / spaCy shows how they have implemented end-to-end CR in their excellent NLP pipeline but as of writing they do not provide a trained model and they require you to have a copy of the Ontonotes dataset.

### Cross-Document Coreference Resolution

Cross-Document Coreference Resolution (CDCR) is when you try to link named entity references across multiple input documents. A use case might be identifying that a number of news articles do actually refer to the same person (e.g. "Joe Biden", "The President").

CDCR is challenging because there are so many possible entities and thus O(n<sup>2</sup>) comparisons to make between candidates.

#### Approaches

- In 2021 [we proposed CD^2CR](https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.12637) - a CDCR approach across documents and domains that allows us to match mentions of people, places, technologies etc across scientific papers and news articles that discuss them.