Exploring Span Representations in Neural Coreference Resolution

AbstractIn coreference resolution, span representations play a key role to predict coreference links accurately. We present a thorough examination of the span representation derived by applying BERT on coreference resolution (Joshi et al., 2019) using a probing model. Our results show that the span representation is able to encode a significant amount of coreference information. In addition, we find that the head-finding attention mechanism involved in creating the spans is crucial in encoding coreference knowledge. Last, our analysis shows that the span representation cannot capture non-local coreference as efficiently as local coreference.