umr4nlp / umr-guidelines

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Events as named entities #14

Open dan-zeman opened 1 year ago

dan-zeman commented 1 year ago

The taxonomy of named entities includes a class called event. I agree that some events have names but this is an interesting (and potentially confusing) twist because "event" is used as a term in the guidelines, and it is said that all processes are events, but states and entities are events only if they are packaged in predication.

I suppose that "event" in the taxonomy of named entities is a different "event", i.e., we can use it as an abstract concept even if it is packaged as reference or modification. If this is a correct assumption, it would be helpful to say it explicitly in the guidelines.

Now my main question is how do we use this concept in annotation. Even if it has a name, it is probably still an event. At least if it is a process, which named events typically are. So, let's say, the sentence is:

The Gallic Wars culminated in the decisive Battle of Alesia in 52 BC.

Table 5 provides war as a type of the class event, so we could do this:

(w/ war
    :name (n/ name :op1 "Gallic Wars")
    :wiki "Q202161")

But we probably also have an eventive concept "war-01", right? This is a non-abstract concept, anchored in a vallency lexicon, so if we are annotating Czech, it will be "válka-01", in Spanish "guerra-01", in Latin "bellum-01" etc. If we use one of these concepts, we will lose the link to the taxonomy of named entities. If we don't use them, we will lose the eventive nature and parallelism to expressions like the war of the Romans against the Gauls:

(w/ war-01
    :ARG0 (p/ person :mod (c/ country :name (n/ name :op1 "Roman Empire")) :ref-number Plural)
    :ARG1 (p2/ person :mod (r/ region :name (n2/ name :op1 "Gaul")) :ref-number Plural))

So what is the expected annotation in these cases?