MEANTIME, the NewsReader Multilingual Event and Time Corpus

MEANTIME, the NewsReader Multilingual Event and Time Corpus Anne-Lyse Minard∗, Manuela Speranza∗, Ruben Urizar∓, Bego˜na Altuna∓, Marieke van Erp3, Anneleen Schoen3, Chantal van Son3 ∗Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy {minard,manspera}@fbk.eu ∓ University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain {ruben.urizar,begona.altuna}@ehu.eus 3Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands {marieke.van.erp,a.m.schoen,c.m.van.son}@vu.nl Abstract In this paper, we present the NewsReader MEANTIME corpus, a semantically annotated corpus of Wikinews articles. The corpus consists of 480 news articles, i.e. 120 English news articles and their translations in Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. MEANTIME contains anno- tations at different levels. The document-level annotation includes markables (e.g. entity mentions, event mentions, time expressions, and numerical expressions), relations between markables (modeling, for example, temporal information and semantic role labeling), and entity and event intra-document coreference. The corpus-level annotation includes entity and event cross-document coreference. Semantic annotation on the English section was performed manually; for the annotation in Italian, Spanish, and (partially) Dutch, a pro- cedure was devised to automatically project the annotations on the English texts onto the translated texts, based on the manual alignment of the annotated elements; this enabled us not only to speed up the annotation process but also provided cross-lingual coreference. The English section of the corpus was extended with timeline annotations for the SemEval 2015 TimeLine shared task. The First CLIN Dutch Shared Task at CLIN26 was based on the Dutch section, while the EVALITA 2016 FactA (Event Factuality Annotation) shared task, based on the Italian section, is currently being organized. Keywords: benchmark for NLP technologies, parallel corpus, semantic annotation, cross-lingual coreference 1. Introduction The NewsReader MEANTIME (Multilingual Event ANd TIME) corpus is a semantically annotated corpus of 480 English, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch news articles. It was created within the NewsReader project,1 whose goal is to build a multilingual system for reconstructing storylines across news articles to provide policy and decision makers with an overview of what happened, to whom, when, and where. Semantic annotations in the MEANTIME corpus span multiple levels, including entities, events, temporal information, semantic roles, and intra-document and cross- document event and entity coreference. The English section of the corpus consists of articles taken from Wikinews,2 and the Spanish, Italian, and Dutch sec- tions are translations of the same texts. This ensures access to non-copyrighted articles for the evaluation of the News- Reader system and enables a fine-grained comparison of natural language processing tools across the languages. Semantic annotation on the English texts was performed manually. For the annotation in Italian, Spanish, and (par- tially) Dutch, we devised a procedure to automatically project the annotations available in the English texts onto the translated texts, based on the manual alignment of the annotated elements, speeding up the annotation process considerably. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. We review related work in Section 2. In Section 3 and 4 we present the different annotation levels and the annotation process. In Section 5 we provide a description of the cor- 1http://www.newsreader-project.eu/ 2Wikinews is a collection of multilingual online news arti- cles written collaboratively …

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