Annotation of Semantic Relations in Patent Documents

This paper presents the theoretical bases and quantitative results of an activity consisting in manually annotating part-whole and motion relations in patent documents. The aim of this activity was creating a gold standard for the evaluation of an automatic relation extraction tool developed by FBK-irst within the PATExpert project. For this purpose, we took the annotation scheme created for the Relation Detection and Recognition task of the Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) Program as a starting point, adapting attribute values to our specific needs. A number of syntactic and semantic aspects have been considered in the annotation, e.g. syntactic class, modality, and semantic role of the relation arguments. The annotation has been inspired by some of the major theories regarding meronymic and mo-

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