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I was wondering if anyone knows whether the current Coreference Resolution model on AllenNLP is commercially usable. All I know is that it is based on SpanBERT and SpanBERT itself has a CC-BY-NC license, but I am not sure whether this license is passed through to the trained model by AllenNLP.

Model card can be found here.

If the Coreference Resolution is for non-commercial use, do you have recommendations for other Coreference Resolution models? I have tried Spacy's neuralcoref and it performed poorly.

Jeffrey Hiraki
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  • Please fix the link to the specific pretrained example of the model you're referring to, so we don't have to guess. Thanks! – MadHatter Jan 29 '21 at 06:52
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    Sorry, copied it from StackOverflow which got closed there, link got lost in the void. – Jeffrey Hiraki Jan 29 '21 at 08:16
  • Thank you for that, but I'd already found that link - I think it's to a running demo of the model, rather than to the distribution page for the code and training corpus of the model. Could you perhaps link to the latter? Or are you asking about using it as a web service that you call? – MadHatter Jan 29 '21 at 08:37
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    Yeah it is a running a demo of the model as listed below. They use a pre-trained model and what I would like to do is use that pre-trained on data. So, download the pretrained model and use the code around it to infer on. On the linked page you see a model-card tag which links to their public model. Further implementation on how to use the model locally and predict with it is based on the AllenNLP library which is commercially usable, however the base model might not be. – Jeffrey Hiraki Jan 29 '21 at 08:46
  • Forgive these questions, which must seem really stupid, but this is not my field. The downloadable file linked from the "Model Card" tab contains a small config.json that makes no menton of licensing, a huge weights.th file which I assume is the trained state, and not much else. Is it your intention to acquire a copy of the SpanBERT model code, feed it this state, and in some way use the result as part of your enterprise? – MadHatter Jan 29 '21 at 08:59
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    That is correct! – Jeffrey Hiraki Jan 29 '21 at 09:51

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You have found a trained-state corpus suitable for use with the SpanBERT tool, and want to know if you can use the combination inside your corporation.

I suspect not. SpanBERT is, as you say, distributed under CC BY-NC 4.0, and the trained-state corpus has no licence declaration on it at all. That means you have no rights to download a copy of the former for commercial purposes, and no rights at all to use the latter.

The exact definition of "commercial purposes" is strewn with thorny interpretational problems, but the discussion is (a) off-topic for this site, and (b) irrelevant anyway, because of the absence of any permission to use the latter. Sorry.

MadHatter
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