Annotation of Coreference Relations Among Linguistic Expressions and Images in Biological Articles

AbstractIn this paper, we propose an annotation scheme which can be used not only for annotating coreference relations between linguistic expressions, but also those among linguistic expressions and images, in scientific texts such as biomedical articles. Images in biomedical domain often contain important information for analyses and diagnoses, and we consider that linking images to textual descriptions of their semantic contents in terms of coreference relations is useful for multimodal access to the information. We present our annotation scheme and the concept of a "coreference pool," which plays a central role in the scheme. We also introduce a support tool for text annotation named Open Ontology Forge which we have already developed, and additional functions for the software to cover image annotations (ImageOF) which is now being developed.