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Meta-Knowledge Annotation of Bio-Events

Biomedical corpora annotated with event-level information provide an important resource for the training of domain-specific information extraction (IE) systems. These corpora concentrate primarily on creating classified, structured representations of important facts and findings contained within the text. However, bio-event annotations often do not take into account additional information (meta-knowledge) that is expressed within the textual context of the bio-event, e.g., the pragmatic/rhetorical intent and the level of certainty ascribed to a particular bio-event by the authors. Such additional information is indispensible for correct interpretation of bio-events. Therefore, an IE system that simply presents a list of “bare” bio-events, without information concerning their interpretation, is of little practical use. We have addressed this sparseness of meta-knowledge available in existing bio-event corpora by developing a multi-dimensional annotation scheme tailored to bio-events. The scheme is intended to be general enough to allow integration with different types of bio-event annotation, whilst being detailed enough to capture important subtleties in the nature of the meta-knowledge expressed about different bio-events. To our knowledge, our scheme is unique within the field with regards to the diversity of meta-knowledge aspects annotated for each event.