Corpus annotation with a linguistic analysis of the associations between event mentions and spatial expressions

Recognizing spatial information associated with events expressed in natural language text is essential for the proper interpretation of such events. However, the associations between events and spatial information found throughout the text have been much less studied than other types of spatial association as looked into in SpatialML and ISO-Space. In this paper, we present an annotation framework for the linguistic analysis of the associations between event mentions and spatial expressions in broadcast news articles. Based on the corpus annotation and analysis, we discuss which information should be included in the guidelines and what makes it difficult to achieve a high inter-annotator agreement. We also discuss possible improvements on the current corpus and annotation framework for insights into developing an automated system.