Summary of the paper
| Title | Annotating Spatial Containment Relations Between Events |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kirk Roberts, Travis Goodwin and Sanda M. Harabagiu |
| Abstract | A significant amount of spatial information in textual documents is hidden within the relationship between events. While humans have an intuitive understanding of these relationships that allow us to recover an object's or event's location, currently no annotated data exists to allow automatic discovery of spatial containment relations between events. We present our process for building such a corpus of manually annotated spatial relations between events. Events form complex predicate-argument structures that model the participants in the event, their roles, as well as the temporal and spatial grounding. In addition, events are not presented in isolation in text; there are explicit and implicit interactions between events that often participate in event structures. In this paper, we focus on five spatial containment relations that may exist between events: (1) SAME, (2) CONTAINS, (3) OVERLAPS, (4) NEAR, and (5) DIFFERENT. Using the transitive closure across these spatial relations, the implicit location of many events and their participants can be discovered. We discuss our annotation schema for spatial containment relations, placing it within the pre-existing theories of spatial representation. We also discuss our annotation guidelines for maintaining annotation quality as well as our process for augmenting SpatialML with spatial containment relations between events. Additionally, we outline some baseline experiments to evaluate the feasibility of developing supervised systems based on this corpus. These results indicate that although the task is challenging, automated methods are capable of discovering spatial containment relations between events. |
| Topics | Information Extraction, Information Retrieval, Semantics, Corpus (creation, annotation, etc.) |
Full paper  |
Annotating Spatial Containment Relations Between Events |
| Bibtex | @InProceedings{ROBERTS12.1091, author = {Kirk Roberts and Travis Goodwin and Sanda M. Harabagiu}, title = {Annotating Spatial Containment Relations Between Events}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)}, year = {2012}, month = {may}, date = {23-25}, address = {Istanbul, Turkey}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Mehmet Uğur Doğan and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-7-7}, language = {english} } |