EasyECR: A Library for Easy Implementation and Evaluation of Event Coreference Resolution Models
This work addresses reproducibility and evaluation issues for researchers in natural language processing, though it is incremental as it builds on existing ECR methods.
The authors tackled the challenges of limited generalizability and difficult comparisons in Event Coreference Resolution (ECR) by developing EasyECR, an open-source library that standardizes data and pipelines, and found that existing pipelines fail to generalize across datasets and all pipeline components significantly affect performance.
Event Coreference Resolution (ECR) is the task of clustering event mentions that refer to the same real-world event. Despite significant advancements, ECR research faces two main challenges: limited generalizability across domains due to narrow dataset evaluations, and difficulties in comparing models within diverse ECR pipelines. To address these issues, we develop EasyECR, the first open-source library designed to standardize data structures and abstract ECR pipelines for easy implementation and fair evaluation. More specifically, EasyECR integrates seven representative pipelines and ten popular benchmark datasets, enabling model evaluations on various datasets and promoting the development of robust ECR pipelines. By conducting extensive evaluation via our EasyECR, we find that, \lowercase\expandafter{\romannumeral1}) the representative ECR pipelines cannot generalize across multiple datasets, hence evaluating ECR pipelines on multiple datasets is necessary, \lowercase\expandafter{\romannumeral2}) all models in ECR pipelines have a great effect on pipeline performance, therefore, when one model in ECR pipelines are compared, it is essential to ensure that the other models remain consistent. Additionally, reproducing ECR results is not trivial, and the developed library can help reduce this discrepancy. The experimental results provide valuable baselines for future research.