The N2 corpus: A semantically annotated collection of Islamist extremist stories

Mark Finlayson, Jeffry Halverson, Steven Corman


Abstract
We describe the N2 (Narrative Networks) Corpus, a new language resource. The corpus is unique in three important ways. First, every text in the corpus is a story, which is in contrast to other language resources that may contain stories or story-like texts, but are not specifically curated to contain only stories. Second, the unifying theme of the corpus is material relevant to Islamist Extremists, having been produced by or often referenced by them. Third, every text in the corpus has been annotated for 14 layers of syntax and semantics, including: referring expressions and co-reference; events, time expressions, and temporal relationships; semantic roles; and word senses. In cases where analyzers were not available to do high-quality automatic annotations, layers were manually double-annotated and adjudicated by trained annotators. The corpus comprises 100 texts and 42,480 words. Most of the texts were originally in Arabic but all are provided in English translation. We explain the motivation for constructing the corpus, the process for selecting the texts, the detailed contents of the corpus itself, the rationale behind the choice of annotation layers, and the annotation procedure.
Anthology ID:
L14-1404
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
896–902
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/48_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mark Finlayson, Jeffry Halverson, and Steven Corman. 2014. The N2 corpus: A semantically annotated collection of Islamist extremist stories. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 896–902, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
The N2 corpus: A semantically annotated collection of Islamist extremist stories (Finlayson et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/48_Paper.pdf