Proceedings of The Sixth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference (CRAC 2023)

Abstract

This is the sixth edition of the Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference (CRAC). CRAC was first held in New Orleans five years ago in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2018. But the workshop series dates back to its predecessor, the Coreference Resolution Beyond OntoNotes (CORBON) that started in 2016, and has arguably become the primary forum for coreference researchers to present their latest results since the demise of the Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium series in 2011. While CORBON focused on under-investigated coreference phenomena, CRAC has a broader scope, covering all cases of computational modeling of reference, anaphora, and coreference.CRAC 2023 continued to attract a large number of very high quality papers. Specifically, we received 15 submissions which were rigorously reviewed by three program committee members. Based on their recommendations, we accepted 10 papers. Two papers were withdrawn. This is the first time we are experimenting with the presentation of a non-archived work in progress. The idea is to allow authors to submit their work in progress for review. If it gets accepted, they can present the work at the workshop. However, it won't be included in the workshop proceedings. Thus, they can still submit a more complete version as original work to another venue. Overall, we were pleased with the large number of submissions as well as the quality of the accepted papers. This is the second year of the CRAC shared task on Multilingual Coreference Resolution. This allows researchers who did not participate in the workshop to disseminate their work to a smaller and more focused audience which should promote interesting discussions.We are grateful to the following people, without whom we could not have assembled an interesting program for the workshop. First, we are indebted to our program committee members. This year the reviewing load was on an average of three papers per reviewer. All of them did the incredible job of completing their reviews in a short reviewing period. This year we have two invited talks. We thank Bernd Bohnet and Milan Straka for accepting our invitation to be this year's invited speakers. We continue the tradition of having a panel on the Universal Anaphora (UA) effort-a unified, language-independent markup scheme that reflects common cross-linguistic understanding of reference-related phenomena. Motivated by Universal Dependencies, UA aims to facilitate referential analysis of the similarities and idiosyncrasies among typologically different languages, support comparative evaluation of anaphora resolution systems and enable comparative linguistic studies. Finally, we would like to thank the workshop participants for joining us in this event.We hope you will enjoy it as much as we do! -