This is code developed by BBN to support the 2015 KBP Event Argument and Linking Shared Task. A description of this task may be found here.

This repository contains three artifacts:

• kbp-events2014 contains classes to represent system responses, assessments, and linkings for the task. While these are mainly to support the executables in this repository, if your system is based on Java or another JVM language, you are strongly encouraged to use them. Note that they can be used from Python via Jython.
• kbp-events2014-scorer contains the scoring code (but not scoring binary).
• kbp-events2014-bin contains all the executable programs: the validator, the pooler, the scorer, etc.

Building

Requirements:

• Maven

Build steps:

• Do mvn install from the root of this repository.
• do chmod +x kbp-events2014-bin/target/appassembler/bin/* (you only need to do this the first time)
• do chmod +x kbp-events2014-scorer/target/appassembler/bin/* (you only need to do this the first time)

Using

System Output Stores and Annotation Stores

A system output store represents the output for a KBP Event Argument system on a collection of documents. It consists of a directory containing exactly one file per input document, named by the docID. The internal format of these files is described in the task specification linked to above.

An annotation store contains assessments of the answers from a system output store. Its format is the same as a system output store except within the files there are additional assessment columns, as described in the task specification.

A linking store groups arguments into event frames. It consists of a directory containing exactly one file per input document, named by the docID. The internal format of these files is described in the task specification linked to above.

Evaluation Workflow

The following workflow will be used during the evaluation. All executables referenced below may be found in either kbp-events2014-bin/target/appassembler/bin or kbp-events-2014-scorer/target/appassembler/bin.

• a 'quote filter' to remove material with CAS and BF offsets in quoted regions will be built from the original text of the data set.
• competitor submissions will be validated using validateSystemOutput.
• all material from quoted regions will be removed from competitor submissions.
• all submissions will be combined into a single system output store using poolSystemOutput.
• this combined system output store will be transformed into an annotation store using importSystemOutputToAnnotationStore.
• LDC annotators will assess this annotation store.
• LDC annotators will link all correctly assesses linkable responses to create reference linkings for each document.
• All competitor submissions will be evaluated against the complete annotation store and reference linkings using KBP2015Scorer.

Parameter Files

Most of the executables take parameter files as input. These have the format

key1: value1
# this is a comment!
key2: value2

validateSystemOutput

This program will check that your submission:

• has the correct format
• contains only legal event roles and types

If either of these fail, the program will halt with an error message. In the future, we plan to add enforcement of rules concerning what portions of answers may come from within <quote> regions.

Additionally, this program will dump to standard output a human-readable version of your responses with all offsets resolved to strings from the original documents so that you can check for mistakes.

This program takes the following parameters:

• systemOutputStore: the path of the system output store to be validated
• validRoles: is data/2014.types.txt (for KBP 2014)
• dump: whether to dump response to stdout in a human readable format.
• docIDMap: (required if dump is true) a list of tab-separated pairs of doc ID and path to the them to standard output.

Note that this currently does not validate linkings.

poolSystemOutput

Combines the system output from multiple systems into a single system output store.

Parameters:

• storesToPool: a file listing paths to stores to pool, one per line
• pooledStore: the location to write the pooled store to
• addMode: either CREATE to create a new store for output (overwriting anything currently there) or ADD to append to an existing store.

importSystemOutputToAnnotationStore

Turns a system output store into an annotation store ready for LDC's annotators.

Parameters:

• systemOutput: system output to import
• annotationStore: location to create annotation store. The program will refused to create a new annotation store over an existing, non-empty one.

KBP2015Scorer

Scores system output against an annotation store.

Parameters:

• answerKey: the path to an annotation store containing assessments for all system responses
• referenceLinking: the path to the reference linking store
• documentsToScore: a file listing the IDs of the documents to be scored, one per line
• either systemOutput or systemOutputsDir. If systemOutput, the value must be a path to the system output to be scored. This path must have an arguments and a linking subdirectory containing a system output store and a linking store, respectively. If systemOutputsDir, the path must contain sub-directories representing the outputs of multiple systems. Each such sub-directory must have the format described above for systemOutput.
• neutralizeRealis: map all realises in system input and the answer key to ACTUAL. This will be false for the evaluation, but setting it to true can be useful for diagnostic purposes. *attemptToNeutralizeCoref: Another diagnostic parameter. If set to true, attempts to minimize the impact of system coreference errors on scoring by
  • Leaving untouched any system response whose base filler assessment correctness matched its CAS assessment correctness.
  • For other responses, if the base filler assessment is correct, replace the response with another which matches it in type, role, and base filler but with a correctly annotated CAS, if possible. If this is not possible, replace it with any correcrly assessed response match its type and role. If this is still not possible, delete the response.

Baseline linking

We provide a baseline implementation of event argument linking for those who wish to try out the 2015 scorer but have not yet developed their own algorithm. This baseline implementation simply links together all arguments of the same event type in a document. To run this, use ApplyLinkingStrategy.

Parameters:

• argumentSystemStore: the system's argument output
• linkingSystemStore: the path to write the baseline linking to

Questions

How can I use the Response, etc. in my system's code?

Add the following to the dependencies section of your project's pom.xml (or take similar steps if using Gradle, etc.):

<dependency>
      <groupId>com.bbn.kbp.events2014</groupId>
      <artifactId>kbp-events2014</artifactId>
      <version>current version listed in pom.xml of this repository</version>
</dependency>

This artifact is not deployed to Maven Central, so you will need to install it in your local repository as described above.

Contact

For questions concerning the software, please contact [email protected]. If you have bugs or feature requests, you can use the GitHub Issue Tracker. To track changes to this repository, follow https://github.com/rgabbard-bbn/kbp-2014-event-arguments/commits/master.atom in an RSS reader.