Comunicació presentada a: LREC 2016, Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, celebrada del 23 al 28 de maig de 2016 a Portorož, Eslovènia.

Despite the popularity of coreference resolution as a research topic, the overwhelming majority of the work in this area focused so far on single antecedence coreference only. Multiple antecedent coreference (MAC) has been largely neglected. This can be explained by the scarcity of the phenomenon of MAC in generic discourse. However, in specialized discourse such as patents, MAC is very dominant. It seems thus unavoidable to address the problem of MAC resolution in the context of tasks related to automatic patent material processing, among them abstractive summarization, deep parsing of patents, construction of concept maps of the inventions, etc. We present the first version of an operational rule-based MAC resolution strategy for patent material that covers the three major types of MAC: (i) nominal MAC, (ii) MAC with personal / relative pronouns, and MAC with reflexive / reciprocal pronouns. The evaluation shows that our strategy performs well in terms of precision and recall.

The research reported in this paper has been carried out in the scope of the iPatDoc project, which was funded by the European Commision under the contract number FP7-SME-606163.