Coreferential Reasoning Learning for Language Representation

Language representation models such as BERT could effectively capture contextual semantic information from plain text, and have been proved to achieve promising results in lots of downstream NLP tasks with appropriate fine-tuning. However, existing language representation models seldom consider coreference explicitly, the relationship between noun phrases referring to the same entity, which is essential to a coherent understanding of the whole discourse. To address this issue, we present CorefBERT, a novel language representation model designed to capture the relations between noun phrases that co-refer to each other. According to the experimental results, compared with existing baseline models, the CorefBERT model has made significant progress on several downstream NLP tasks that require coreferential reasoning, while maintaining comparable performance to previous models on other common NLP tasks.