Annotating Events, Temporal Expressions and Relations in Italian: the It-Timeml Experience for the Ita-TimeBank

This paper presents the annotation guidelines and specifications which have been developed for the creation of the Italian TimeBank, a language resource composed of two corpora manually annotated with temporal and event information. In particular, the adaptation of the TimeML scheme to Italian is described, and a special attention is given to the methodology used for the realization of the annotation specifications, which are strategic in order to create good quality annotated resources and to justify the annotated items. The reliability of the It-TimeML guidelines and specifications is evaluated on the basis of the results of the inter-coder agreement performed during the annotation of the two corpora.