Richer Event Description: Integrating event coreference with temporal, causal and bridging annotation

Tim O'Gorman, Kristin Wright-Bettner, Martha Palmer

Abstract:

There have been a wide range of recent annotated corpora concerning events, either regarding event coreference, the temporal order
of events, hierarchical “subevent” structure of
events, or causal relationships between events.
However, although some believe that these
different phenomena will display rich interactions, relatively few corpora annotate all of
those layers of annotation in a unified fashion.
This paper describes the annotation methodology for the Richer Event Descriptions corpus, which annotates entities, events, times,
their coreference and partial coreference relations, and the temporal, causal and subevent
relationships between the events. It suggests
that such rich annotations of within-document
event phenomena can be built with high quality through a multi-stage annotation pipeline,
and that the resultant corpus could be useful
for systems hoping to transition from the detection of isolated mentions of events toward
a richer understanding of events grounded in
the temporal, causal, referential and bridging
relations that define them