STPar: A Structure-Aware Triaffine Parser for Screenplay Character Coreference Resolution

Abstract

Character Coreference Resolution in Movie Screenplays (MovieCoref) is a newly emerging task for understanding complex movie plots and character relationships. This task poses greater challenges than traditional coreference resolution, due to the intricate narrative structures and character interactions unique to screenplays. In light of these challenges, we introduce a novel approach: a Structure-aware Triaffine Parser (STPar) for the MovieCoref task. STPar combines discourse and syntactic structures in the feature encoding process, enabling comprehensive analysis of ternary relationships and complex interactions. During the pairing process, STPar utilizes a triaffine scorer to consider high-order relations between candidate mention pairs, thus enhancing its ability to capture detailed narrative structures. In addition, STPar incorporates multi-task learning, encompassing singleton and span detection tasks, to further improve coreference resolution performance. Our evaluations on the MovieCoref dataset demonstrate that STPar significantly outperforms the best baseline by 7.4%, 21.5%, 7.1% and 10.2% in F1 scores of B^3, CEAF_e, LEA and CoNLL. Further analysis highlights the benefits of integrating structural discourse and syntactic information as well as the combined approaches of triaffine and multi-task learning.