Annotation and Evaluation of Coreference Resolution in Screenplays

Screenplays refer to characters using different names, pronouns, and nominal expressions. We need to resolve these mentions to the correct referent character for better story understanding and holistic research in computational narratology. Coreference resolution of character mentions in screenplays becomes challenging because of the large document lengths, unique structural features like scene headers, interleaving of action and speech passages, and reliance on the accompanying video. In this work, we first adapt widelyused annotation guidelines to address domainspecific issues in screenplays. We develop an automatic screenplay parser to extract the structural information and design coreference rules based upon the structure. Our model exploits these structural features and outperforms a benchmark coreference model on the screenplay coreference resolution task.