Mention detection in coreference resolution: survey

Coreference Resolution is an essential task for Natural Language Processing (NLP) application, which has a paramount impact on the performance of text summarization, machine translation, text classification, and recognizing textual entailment. Mention Detection (MD) is the core component of the coreference resolution task and is additionally a process of extraction of all possible mentions from the text. Mention is referred to as a textual representation of entities in the text, such as Name, Nominal, and Pronominal mentions. The mentions appear in the text using different representations but indicating the same entity. The performance of an MD module positively affects the performance of NLP tasks such as Coreference resolution, Relation Extraction, Information retrieval, Information extraction, etc. Incorrect identification of mentions in the text severely affects the efficiency of the coreference resolution task. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview for the state of the art of mention detection approaches, which is utilized in the coreference resolution task and explains the importance of MD in Coreference resolution. The subsisting approaches are classified based on the underlying techniques adopted by each approach in three categories: Rule-based mention detection, Statistics-based mention detection, and Deep learning-based mention detection. The performance of deep learning is improving as more data and more powerful computing resources become available. This study endeavors to provide a comparative analysis of various mention detection approaches and help the researchers to assimilate knowledge about the mention detection approaches from sundry aspects.