The Challenges of Cross-Document Coreference Resolution in Email

Long-form conversations such as email are an important source of information for knowledge capture. For tasks such as knowledge graph construction, conversational search, and entity linking, being able to resolve entities from across documents is important. Building on recent work on within document coreference resolution for email, we study for the first time a cross-document formulation of the problem. Our results show that the current state-of-the-art deep learning models for general cross-document coreference resolution are insufficient for email conversations. Our experiments show that the general task is challenging and, importantly for knowledge intensive tasks, coreference resolution models that only treat entity mentions perform worse. Based on these results, we outline the work needed to address this challenging task.