ReferenceNet: a semantic-pragmatic network for capturing reference relations

In this paper, we present ReferenceNet: a semantic-pragmatic network of reference relations between synsets. Synonyms are assumed to be exchangeable in similar contexts and also word embeddings are based on sharing of local contexts represented as vectors. Co-referring words, however, tend to occur in the same topical context but in different local contexts. In addition, they may express different concepts related through topical coherence, and through author framing and perspective. In this paper, we describe how reference relations can be added to WordNet and how they can be acquired. We evaluate two methods of extracting event coreference relations using WordNet relations against a manual annotation of 38 documents within the same topical domain of gun violence. We conclude that precision is reasonable but recall is lower because the Word-Net hierarchy does not sufficiently capture the required coherence and perspective relations.