Metonymic use of capital cities

uhermjakob commented 10 years ago

Following up on the discussion we had at the AMR phone meeting today, the AMR corpus currently contains 8 instances of named entities with a metonymic use of capital cities to represent the government of the corresponding country.

Example:

sdl_0003.69 According to a previous agreement between Seoul and Pyongyang, South Korea will deliver a total of 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil within 20 days of delivering the first shipment of oil.
::ne government-organization: Seoul
::ne government-organization: Pyongyang
::ne country: South Korea

List of cities (sometimes) annotated as a government-organization:

Washington (3 instances), Beijing, Havana, Pyongyang, Seoul, Tehran (1 instance each)

Is this what we want? Or is it just too tricky to draw the line?

Note that in the example sentence, South Korea in some way also stands in for some South Korean entity, but currently, no country is annotated as a government-organization or anything else hinting at metonymy.

nschneid commented 10 years ago

What about a rule that says: if LOCALE can be paraphrased as "the government of LOCALE", it should be AMRed accordingly?

Metonymic use of capital cities could be trickier...something like "government of the country whose capital is CITYNAME". (To contrast with the government of the city itself.) Likewise with headquarters (the White House, the Pentagon):

the White House

(b / building :name (n / name :op1 "White" :op2 "House")
   :location-of (h / headquarter-01
                   :ARG1 (g / government-organization)))

the White House's argument

(t / thing
   :ARG1-of (a / argue-01
               :ARG0 (g / government-organization
                        :ARG1-of (h / headquarter-01
                                    :location (b / building :name (n / name :op1 "White" :op2 "House"))))))

Or is that too complicated to read, even with a preprocessor?

kevincrawfordknight commented 10 years ago

I'm sure the IE annotation community has tackled metonymic usage before. We might either adopt their guidelines, or take what they do and then improve it. If anyone has their guidelines, maybe post them here.

amrisi / amr-guidelines

Metonymic use of capital cities #103