Incorporating Dropped Pronouns into Coreference Resolution: The case for Turkish

Abstract

Representation of coreferential relations is a challenging and actively studied topic for prodrop and morphologically rich languages (PD-MRLs) due to dropped pronouns (e.g., null subjects and omitted possessive pronouns). These phenomena require a representation scheme at the morphology level and enhanced evaluation methods. In this paper, we propose a representation & evaluation scheme to incorporate dropped pronouns into coreference resolution and validate it on the Turkish language. Using the scheme, we extend the annotations on the only existing Turkish coreference dataset, which originally did not contain annotations for dropped pronouns. We provide publicly available pre and post processors to enhance the prominent CoNLL coreference scorer also to cover coreferential relations arising from dropped pronouns. As a final step, the paper reports the first neural Turkish coreference resolution results in the literature. Although validated on Turkish, the proposed scheme is languageindependent and may be used for other PD-MRLs.