What Is a Coreference?

Coreference is a phenomenon in language where multiple words or phrases have the same referent. This means that they both refer to the same person, place, thing, or other applicable noun. This element of linguistic analysis helps to study the ways that language is used. It is also useful in the more modern study of natural language processing, which acts as a foundation for various computer models that analyze speech.

Some simple examples of coreferences will help beginners to understand what constitutes this kind of linguistic pattern. For example, if someone says “you thought that you could achieve the goal,” the two instances of the pronoun, “you,” both refer to the same person, and so this is a form of coreference. In these examples, the two words do not have to be the same. For example, someone who says, “John thought that he could achieve the goal,” is still generating coreference with the words “John” and “he,” which, again, both refer to the same person.

In terms of technical linguistics, coreference is an example of a kind of anaphora, which is a case where one expression refers to another. Some experts break this down into two subcategories, where anaphora is a case of an expression referring to a subsequent expression, and another term, cataphora, is used for an expression that refers to a preceding expression. As a category of anaphora, coreference also shows how certain expressions, particularly pronouns, can be quite ambiguous, and need context for processing.

When coreference is used in the service of natural language processing, it can look much different than when it is part of a general study of speech. Computers utilize highly advanced algorithms to achieve natural language processing in all of its forms. Extremely intricate and complex logic is necessary to parse speech from a technological standpoint, simply because so much of language revolves around one human being’s ability to interpret the words and phrases of another.

In order to get around the difficulty of replicating natural language understanding with computers, designers and developers might use a concept that is called coreference resolution. This technique allows the technology to become more intelligent in terms of processing natural language by working with coreferences in a particular way. Some experts would describe the process of coreference resolution as a process where the computer labels all of the expressions, and then organizes or categorizes them into some coherent result.