BART goes multilingual: The UniTN / Essex submission to the CoNLL-2012 Shared Task

This paper describes the UniTN/Essex sub-mission to the CoNLL-2012 Shared Task on the Multilingual Coreference Resolution. We have extended our CoNLL-2011 submission, based on BART, to cover two additional lan-guages, Arabic and Chinese. This paper fo-cuses on adapting BART to new languages, discussing the problems we have encountered and the solutions adopted. In particular, we propose a novel entity-mention detection algo-rithm that might help identify nominal men-tions in an unknown language. We also dis-cuss the impact of basic linguistic information on the overall performance level of our coref-erence resolution system.