This partitioning can be recursive , i.e., each of these sets can be further partitioned, capturing candidate splits for an entity that can facilitate inference.

In order to represent our recursive model of coreference, we include two types of factors: pairwise factors wpw that measure compatibility between a child node-record and its parent, and unit-wise factors wrw that measure compatibilities of the node-records themselves.

First, the recursive nature of the tree (arbitrary depth and width) allows the model to adapt to different types of data and effectively compress entities of different scales (e.g., entities with more mentions may require a deeper hierarchy to compress).