Annotating story timelines as temporal dependency structures

Steven Bethard, Oleksandr Kolomiyets, Marie Francine Moens

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present an approach to annotating timelines in stories where events are linked together by temporal relations into a temporal dependency tree. This approach avoids the disconnected timeline problems of prior work, and results in timelines that are more suitable for temporal reasoning. We show that annotating timelines as temporal dependency trees is possible with high levels of inter-annotator agreement - Krippendorff's Alpha of 0.822 on selecting event pairs, and of 0.700 on selecting temporal relation labels - even with the moderately sized relation set of BEFORE, AFTER, INCLUDES, IS-INCLUDED, IDENTITY and OVERLAP. We also compare several annotation schemes for identifying story events, and show that higher inter-annotator agreement can be reached by focusing on only the events that are essential to forming the timeline, skipping words in negated contexts, modal contexts and quoted speech.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2012
EditorsMehmet Ugur Dogan, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Sara Goggi, Khalid Choukri, Nicoletta Calzolari, Jan Odijk, Thierry Declerck, Bente Maegaard, Stelios Piperidis, Helene Mazo, Olivier Hamon
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages2721-2726
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9782951740877
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Event8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2012 - Istanbul, Turkey
Duration: May 21 2012May 27 2012

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2012

Conference

Conference8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2012
Country/TerritoryTurkey
CityIstanbul
Period5/21/125/27/12

Keywords

  • Annotation
  • Dependency trees
  • Timelines

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Education
  • Library and Information Sciences

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