How Much Processing Is Required for Cross-Document Coreference?

Cross-document coreference occurs when the same person, place, event, or concept is discussed in more than one text source. Computer recognition of this phenomenon is important because it helps break \the document boundary" by allowing a user to examine information about a particular entity from multiple text sources at the same time. Cross-document coref-erence was identiied as one of the potential tasks for the Sixth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-6) but was not included as a formal task because it was considered too ambitious(Grishman, 94). In this paper we describe and compare our position with that of the MUC-6 organizing committee regarding the amount of processing needed to resolve cross-document coreferences. We back our position by providing details of our cross-document coreference system .