ACE 2005 Annotation Tasks
There are four distinct annotation tasks for the 2005 ACE effort.
Entities
Entity tagging the core annotation task, providing the foundation for all remaining tasks. The current ACE task identifies seven types of entities: Person, Organization, Location, Facility, Weapon, Vehicle and Geo-Political Entity (GPEs). Each type is further divided into subtypes (for instance, Person subtypes include Individual, Group and Indefinite). Annotators tag all mentions of each entity within a document, whether named, nominal or pronominal. For every mention, the annotator identifies the maximal extent of the string that represents the entity and labels the head of each mention. Nested mentions are also captured. Each entity is classified according to its type and subtype. Each entity mention is further tagged according to its class â specific, generic, attributive, negatively quantified or underspecified. Annotators also review the entire document to group mentions of the same entity together; they also label cases of metonymy, where the name of one entity is used to refer to another entity (or entities) related to it.
Values
A Value is a text string that further characterizes the properties of some Entity or Event. The value annotation task consists of simply identifying the text string containing the value mention. Annotators tag the following values: NUMERIC, CONTACT-INFO, TIMEX2, JOB-TITLE, CRIME and SENTENCE.
Relations
The goal of the Relation task is to detect and characterize Relations of the targeted Types between entities. Relations are ordered pairs of entities. Annotators label the type and subtype for each relation, along with its syntactic class and syntactic extent. Relations are also tagged for modality and tense. Finally, annotators timestamp relations that contain temporal expressions within their extent.
Events
Event annotation is limited to a constrained set of types and subtypes. For each atomic event mentioned in the text, annotators label the event's extent (the sentence containing the event) and its trigger. (the word that most clearly expresses the event's occurrence). Annotators further tag all of the participants (ACE entities) involved in that event. In addition, annotators label attributes (entities and values) that are part of the event but do not constitute event participants. Event participants and attributes taken together are known as event arguments. Finally, annotators label each event for polarity, tense, genericity and modality.
The guidelines below spell out detailed rules for annotating entities, values, relations and events for each language.
2005 English Annotation Guidelines:
English-Entities-Guidelines_v5.6.6.pdf (August 1, 2006)English-Values-Guidelines_v1.2.4.pdf (July 1, 2005)
English-Relations-Guidelines_v5.8.3.pdf (July 1, 2005) English-Events-Guidelines_v5.4.3.pdf (July 1, 2005) English-TimestampingGuidelines_v3.pdf
English-TIMEX2-Guidelines_v0.1.pdf
2005 Chinese Annotation Guidelines:
Chinese-Entities-Guidelines_v5.5.pdfChinese-Values-Guidelines_v1.1.2.pdf (June 10, 2005)
Chinese-Relations-Guidelines_v5.5.1.pdf (July 1, 2005)
Chinese-Events-Guidelines_v5.5.1.pdf (July 1, 2005)
Chinese-TIMEX2-Guideline-Summary_v1.2.pdf
Chinese-Timestamping-Guidelines_v2.pdf
2005 Arabic Annotation Guidelines:
Arabic-Entities-Guidelines_v6.0.pdf (November 20, 2006)Arabic-Values-Guidelines_v1.2.3.pdf
Arabic-Relations-Guidelines_v5.3.4.pdf (July 1, 2005)
Arabic-Events-Guidelines_v5.4.4.pdf (July 1, 2005)