How to Evaluate Coreference in Literary Texts?

Abstract

In this short paper, we examine the main metrics used to evaluate textual coreference and we detail some of their limitations. We show that a unique score cannot represent the full complexity of the problem at stake, and is thus uninformative, or even misleading. We propose a new way of evaluating coreference, taking into account the context (in our case, the analysis of fictions, esp. novels). More specifically, we propose to distinguish long coreference chains (corresponding to main characters), from short ones (corresponding to secondary characters), and singletons (isolated elements). This way, we hope to get more interpretable and thus more informative results through evaluation.