ACE (Automatic Content Extraction) English Annotation Guidelines for Events
5.4.3 2005.07.01 edition, (2005)Description
Guide to annotating events for ACE2005 English. Description of event types (5), triggers (2.3), properties (3), arguments (6; participants and attributes), coreference (4).
"An event is a specific occurrence involving participants. And Event is something that happens. An Event can frequently be described as a change of state."
Types: 33 sub-types (in 8 groupings: LIFE, MOVEMENT, TRANSACTION, BUSINESS, CONFLICT, CONTACT, PERSONNEL, JUSTICE)
Event trigger: "the word which most clearly expresses [an event]'s occurrence". (May be two words for verb-particle constructions.) The containing sentence is the "event extent". Event triggers are most often verbs, but may be: adjectives/participles as resultative/resultative-like stative or active descriptors of events; nouns or pronouns. [As such, the sentence may only need to imply that an event has the potential to occur, as is 'born' in "the presumably Australian-born victim". Is 'victim' meant to be annotated?] A trigger must not be a taggable entity. Some ambiguous expressions such as "this opportunity for peace" may only be labelled when clearly coreferent with an unambiguous trigger.
Event properties: polarity (POSITIVE or NEGATIVE; negation includes contexts such as 'refused to ...'), tense (PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE, UNSPECIFIED), genericity (SPECIFIC or GENERIC; specific must be a singular or finite number of occurrences), modality (ASSERTED or OTHER).
Event arguments: each event has a specific set of participant roles, as well as other attributes (most have only PLACE and TIME). All must be taggable entities; so for instance "method of execution" or "reason for execution" may not be event arguments, but "crime" may be. Number of arguments ranges from 3 to 7. [Designation of an entity as participant or attribute can be arbitrary; PRICE is a participant in a TRANSPORT event.]
Event coreference: events must have identical referent and be in the same document. Mentions to parts of events do not corefer.