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framework, the BE-INST relation only relates a plural NP and an NP representing a
subset of the plural NP.
With this discussion we can now define and exemplify the eleven relation types used
in the anaphora interpretation framework. They are:
CAUSE
- Includes all causal relations. For example,
battle/fatigue
,
earthquake/tsunami
HAVE
- Includes notions of possession. This includes diverse examples such as
snake/
poison
,
house/window
and
cake/apple
.
MAKE
- Includes examples such as
concrete house
,
tar/road
and
lead/pencil
.
USE
- Some examples are
drill/electricity
and
steam/ship
.
BE-INST
- Includes plural cases such as
both trucks/southbound truck
,
John/teachers
.
BE-OCCR
- Describes the same instance participating in multiple events. For example
John Smith/Mr Smith/he
and
John Smith/the driver
.
IN
- This relation captures grouping of things that share physical or temporal proper-
ties. For example
lamp/table
and
Auckland/New Zealand
.
FOR
- This includes purpose of one entity for another. For example
pen/writing
and
soccer ball/play
.
FROM
- This includes cases where one entity is derived from another. For example
olive/oil
and
wheat/flour
.
ABOUT
- Describes cases where one entity is a topic of the other. For example
travel/
story
and
loan/terms
.
ACTION
- This is only a contextual relation meant to capture entities engaged in same
or similar action either with the same object/s or a null object.
The next section describes the annotation experiment done in order to validate that
anaphora usage is based on the above relation types.
4
Annotation Experiment
4.1
Annotators
For the purpose of human validation of all relations in the framework we used second
and third year students enrolled in computer related degrees. The annotation experi-
ments were done over a period of 4 weeks at the beginning of their usual classes. Four
different streams were used each consisting of approximately 30 students. The students
in each stream were given a basic training on the requirements of the annotation and
they were given a single annotation task at the beginning of their class over a 4 week
period. The whole annotation experiment was broken down into session based tasks
involving 25 anaphoric NPs per task. This was done to ensure that each task was com-
pleted in about 10 minutes with minimal impact on the students class time. In addition,
the annotators were not identified in any of the tasks. We only ensured that an annotator
did not annotate the same task twice.
