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A Corpus for Cross-Document Co-reference

This paper describes a newly created text corpus of news articles that has been annotated for cross-document co-reference. Being able to robustly resolve references to entities across document boundaries will provide a useful capability for a variety of tasks, ranging from practical information retrieval applications to challenging research in information extraction and natural language understanding. This annotated corpus is intended to encourage the development of systems that can more accurately address this problem. A manual annotation tool was developed that allowed the complete corpus to be searched for likely co-referring entity mentions. This corpus of 257K words links mentions of co-referent people, locations and organizations (subject to some additional constraints). Each of the documents had already been annotated for within-document co-reference by the LDC as part of the ACE series of evaluations. The annotation process was bootstrapped with a string-matching-based linking procedure, and we report on some of initial experimentation with the data. The cross-document linking information will be made publicly available.