Annotating Spatial Containment Relations Between Events

Kirk Roberts, Travis Goodwin, 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.
Anthology ID:
L12-1649
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3052–3059
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/1091_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kirk Roberts, Travis Goodwin, and Sanda M. Harabagiu. 2012. Annotating Spatial Containment Relations Between Events. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 3052–3059, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Annotating Spatial Containment Relations Between Events (Roberts et al., LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/1091_Paper.pdf