Examining the Impact of Coreference Resolution on Quote Attribution

Quote attribution is the task of identifying the speaker of each quote within a document. While recent research has established large-scale corpora for this task, these corpora are not yet consistent in the way they handle candidate speakers, and many of the reported results rely on gold standard annotations of both entities and coreference chains. In this work we evaluate three quote attribution systems with automatically produced candidate speakers and coreference chains. We perform these experiments over four separate corpora, which allows us to determine how coreference resolution effects quote attribution, and to use the task as an extrinsic evaluation of three coreference systems.