Span annotation

General annotation guidelines

The following guidelines apply to span annotation in general, in addition to the type-specific guidelines presented below. Note that the syntactic guidelines relate primarily to the annotation for continuants such as physical objects. For the annotation of processes, qualities, and other non-continuant types, see the section for the relevant type below.

Name mention annotation

The following guidelines apply to the annotation of mentions of (proper) names (“named entity annotation”). (see NAME)

Specificity: Name mention annotations mark spans that specifically identify the entity referred to.

Structure: Name mention annotations most typically mark sequences of proper nouns constituting a name, but other fixed expressions that are established as referring to specific entities are also annotated. Name mention annotations can span any parts of speech that are part of names (United States of America).

Extent: Name mention annotations cover the minimal span of characters containing the name of the referenced entity. Words that are not fixed parts of the name, including determiners ([the] NIST), head nouns (PTB [corpus]; contrast British National Corpus), modifiers ([19th century] French), and honorifics ([Prof.] Charniak), are not included in the name mention annotation span, even if they further specify the referrent.

Nesting: Name mention annotations do not contain (nest) any other annotations. In cases where multiple candidate name mention annotations appear nested, only the outermost is marked.

Nominal mention annotation

The following guidelines apply to the annotation of nominal mentions.

Specificity: Nominal mentions of entitites of types in annotation scope are marked regardless of specificity.

Structure: Nominal mentions typically consist of a head noun with adjective and noun premodifiers. Determiners (the, a), prepositional phrases (of …, with …), subordinate clauses (… that has …) and similar postmodififers are not normally included in annotated spans. (Exceptions are allowed in cases where an expression with such structure has become fixed and is necessary as a whole for identifying the referrent.)

Extent: Nominal mention annotations cover the full span of characters containing the most specific mention, excluding modifiers not pertaining to type. Words referring to subjective aspects or properties that pertain to e.g. an individual instance being discussed rather than to its specific type (e.g. [tall] person) are excluded from the span of the nominal annotation. (Note that e.g. tall for tall person is annotated as a separate span with type quality spans, associated with the annotation with an attribute relation.)

Nesting: Nominal mention annotations contain (nest) any name mention annotations that occur in their span. Nominal mention annotations may also nest other nominal mention annotations according to type-specific rules.

Type-specific guidelines