Encoding World Knowledge in the Evaluation of Local Coherence

Muyu Zhang, Vanessa Wei Feng, Bing Qin, Graeme Hirst, Ting Liu, Jingwen Huang

Abstract: Previous work on text coherence was primarily based on matching multiple mentions of the same entity in di erent parts of the text; therefore, it misses the contribution from semantically related but not necessarily coreferential entities (e.g., Gates and Microsoft). In this paper, we capture such semantic relatedness by leveraging world knowledge (e.g., Gates is the person who created Microsoft), and use two existing evaluation frameworks. First, in the unsupervised framework, we introduce semantic relatedness as an enrichment to the original graph-based model of Guinaudeau and Strube (2013). In addition, we incorporate semantic relatedness as additional features into the popular entity-based model of Barzilay and Lapata (2008). Across both frameworks, our enriched model with semantic relatedness outperforms the original methods, especially on short documents.