An Exercise in Reuse of Resources: Adapting General Discourse Coreference Resolution for Detecting Lexical Chains in Patent Documentation.

The Stanford Coreference Resolution System (StCR) is a multi-pass, rule-based system that scored best in the CoNLL 2011 shared task on general discourse coreference resolution. We describe how the StCR has been adapted to the specific domain of patents and give some cues on how it can be adapted to other domains. We present a linguistic analysis of the patent domain and how we were able to adapt the rules to the domain and to expand coreferences with some lexical chains. A comparative evaluation shows an improvement of the coreference resolution system, denoting that (i) StCR is a valuable tool across different text genres; (ii) specialized discourse NLP may significantly benefit from general discourse NLP research.