Annotation Guide for the UCM/MIT Indications, Referential Expressions, and Coreference Corpus (UMIREC Corpus)

Abstract

This is the annotation guide given to the annotators who created the UCM/MIT Indications, Referring Expressions, and Coreference (UMIREC) Corpus version 1.0. The corpus comprises texts annotated for referring expressions, coreference relations between the referring expressions, and so-called "indication structures", which split referring expressions into constituents (nuclei and modifiers) and mark each constituent as either 'distinctive' or 'descriptive', which indicate whether or not the constituent contains information required for uniquely identifying the referent. The contents of this corpus, the annotation procedure, and the indication structures are described in more detail in a paper titled "The Prevalence of Descriptive Referring Expressions in News and Narrative" published in the proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, held in July 2010 in Uppsala, Sweden (ACL-2010).