ACL2026

Incorporating Temporal Coherence to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution

Xinyu Chen, Peifeng Li, Qiaoming Zhu

Abstract

Previous work on cross-document event coreference resolution (CDECR) primarily focused on enhancing semantic coherence between event mentions, largely overlooking the critical aspect of temporal coherence. To address this issue, we propose CohTP, a novel T em p oral Coh orence-driven event coreference framework. CohTP explicitly models and enforces temporal constraints by first constructing a temporal event graph via a fine-tuned natural language inference (NLI) model. The graph is then refined using an Edge-Aware GNN to resolve conflicts and partitioned into ordered time segments, where undirected edges group contemporaneous events. Event coreference resolution is subsequently performed within these temporally coherent segments, where event representations are further augmented with temporally consistent contexts. Experiments on the ECB+, GVC, WEC, and ECB+META datasets show that CohTP outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines.