Coreference resolution is a key problem in natural language understanding that still escapes reliable solutions. One fundamental difficulty has been that of resolving instances involving pronouns since they often require deep language understanding and use of background knowledge. In this paper we propose an algorithmic solution that involves a new representation for the knowledge required to address hard coreference problems, along with a constrained optimization framework that uses this knowledge in coreference decision making. Our representation, Predicate Schemas, is instantiated with knowledge acquired in an unsupervised way, and is compiled automatically into constraints that impact the coreference decision. We present a general coreference resolution system that significantly improves state-of-the-art performance on hard, Winograd-style, pronoun resolution cases, while still performing at the stateof-the-art level on standard coreference resolution datasets.

Automatic story comprehension is a fundamental challenge in Natural Language Understanding, and can enable computers to learn about social norms, human behavior and commonsense. In this paper, we present a story comprehension model that explores three distinct semantic aspects: (i) the sequence of events described in the story, (ii) its emotional trajectory, and (iii) its plot consistency. We judge the model's understanding of real-world stories by inquiring if, like humans, it can develop an expectation of what will happen next in a given story. Specifically, we use it to predict the correct ending of a given short story from possible alternatives. The model uses a hidden variable to weigh the semantic aspects in the context of the story. Our experiments demonstrate the potential of our approach to characterize these semantic aspects, and the strength of the hidden variable based approach. The model outperforms the stateof-the-art approaches and achieves best results on a publicly available dataset.

An important aspect of natural language understanding involves recognizing and categorizing events and the relations among them. However, these tasks are quite subtle and annotating training data for machine learning based approaches is an expensive task, resulting in supervised systems that attempt to learn complex models from small amounts of data, which they over-fit. This paper addresses this challenge by developing an event detection and co-reference system with minimal supervision, in the form of a few event examples. We view these tasks as semantic similarity problems between event mentions or event mentions and an ontology of types, thus facilitating the use of large amounts of out of domain text data. Notably, our semantic relatedness function exploits the structure of the text by making use of a semantic-role-labeling based representation of an event. We show that our approach to event detection is competitive with the top supervised methods. More significantly, we outperform stateof-the-art supervised methods for event coreference on benchmark data sets, and support significantly better transfer across domains.

Natural language understanding often requires deep semantic knowledge. Expanding on previous proposals, we suggest that some important aspects of semantic knowledge can be modeled as a language model if done at an appropriate level of abstraction. We develop two distinct models that capture semantic frame chains and discourse information while abstracting over the specific mentions of predicates and entities. For each model, we investigate four implementations: a "standard" N-gram language model and three discriminatively trained "neural" language models that generate embeddings for semantic frames. The quality of the semantic language models (SemLM) is evaluated both intrinsically, using perplexity and a narrative cloze test and extrinsically -we show that our SemLM helps improve performance on semantic natural language processing tasks such as co-reference resolution and discourse parsing.

In coreference resolution, a fair amount of research treats mention detection as a preprocessed step and focuses on developing algorithms for clustering coreferred mentions. However, there are significant gaps between the performance on gold mentions and the performance on the real problem, when mentions are predicted from raw text via an imperfect Mention Detection (MD) module. Motivated by the goal of reducing such gaps, we develop an ILP-based joint coreference resolution and mention head formulation that is shown to yield significant improvements on coreference from raw text, outperforming existing state-ofart systems on both the ACE-2004 and the CoNLL-2012 datasets. At the same time, our joint approach is shown to improve mention detection by close to 15% F1. One key insight underlying our approach is that identifying and co-referring mention heads is not only sufficient but is more robust than working with complete mentions.