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BASHI: A Corpus of Wall Street Journal Articles Annotated with Bridging Links

This paper presents a corpus resource for the anaphoric phenomenon of bridging, named BASHI. The corpus consisting of 50 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) articles adds bridging anaphors and their antecedents to the other gold annotations that have been created as part of the OntoNotes project (Weischedel et al. 2011). Bridging anaphors are context-dependent expressions that do not refer to the same entity as their antecedent, but to a related entity. Bridging resolution is an under-researched area of NLP, where the lack of annotated training data makes the application of statistical models difficult. Thus, we believe that the corpus is a valuable resource for researchers interested in anaphoric phenomena going beyond coreference, as it can be combined with other corpora to create a larger corpus resource. The corpus contains 57,709 tokens and 459 bridging pairs and is available for download in an offset-based format and a CoNLL-12 style bridging column that can be merged with the other annotation layers in OntoNotes. The paper also reviews previous annotation efforts and different definitions of bridging and reports challenges with respect to the bridging annotation.