Are Large Language Models Robust Zero-shot Coreference Resolvers?
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Recent progress in domain adaptation for coreference resolution relies on continued training using annotated data from target domains. At the same time, pre-trained large language models (LMs) have exhibited strong zero- and few-shot learning abilities across a wide range of NLP tasks including pronoun resolution. While this demonstrates evidence of coreference ability, previous work has mostly studied this ability using simple sentence-level datasets such as the Winograd Schema Challenge. In this work, we assess the feasibility of zero-shot learning for coreference resolution by evaluating instruction-tuned language models on more difficult, linguistically-complex coreference benchmarks (e.g., CoNLL-2012). We demonstrate that zero-shot prompting outperforms current unsupervised coreference systems. Further investigations reveal the robust zero-shot generalization ability of instruction-tuned LMs across a wide range of domains, languages, and time periods, as well as a strong reliance on high-quality mention detection systems.
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