Annotating Near-Identity from Coreference Disagreements
Marta Vilar Recasens, Maria Antònia Martí, Constantin Orǎsan · 2012
We present an extension of the coreference annotation in the English NP4E and the Catalan AnCora-CA corpora with near-identity relations, which are borderline cases of coreference.The annotated subcorpora have 50K tokens each.Near-identity relations, as presented by Recasens et al. (2010; 2011), build upon the idea that identity is a continuum rather than an either/or relation, thus introducing a middle ground category to explain currently problematic cases.The first annotation effort that we describe shows that it is not possible to annotate near-identity explicitly because subjects are not fully aware of it.Therefore, our second annotation effort used an indirect method, and arrived at near-identity annotations by inference from the disagreements between five annotators who had only a two-alternative choice between coreference and non-coreference.The results show that whereas as little as 2-6% of the relations were explicitly annotated as near-identity in the former effort, up to 12-16% of the relations turned out to be near-identical following the indirect method of the latter effort.