Proposal for an Extension of Traditional Named Entities: From Guidelines to Evaluation, an Overview

Within the framework of the construction of a fact database, we defined guidelines to extract named entities, using a taxonomy based on an extension of the usual named entities defini-tion. We thus defined new types of entities with broader coverage including substantive-based expressions. These extended named en-tities are hierarchical (with types and compo-nents) and compositional (with recursive type inclusion and metonymy annotation). Human annotators used these guidelines to annotate a 1.3M word broadcast news corpus in French. This article presents the definition and novelty of extended named entity annotation guide-lines, the human annotation of a global corpus and of a mini reference corpus, and the evalu-ation of annotations through the computation of inter-annotator agreement. Finally, we dis-cuss our approach and the computed results, and outline further work.