96 • 2011 - Hamburger Zentrum für Sprachkorpora - Universität ...

Multilingual Resources and Multilingual Applications - Regular Papers
Towards Multilingual Biographical Event Extraction
– Initial Thoughts on the Design of a new Annotation Scheme –
Michaela Geierhos * , Jean-Leon Bouraoui § , Patrick Watrin §
* CIS, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, D-80539 München, Germany
§ CENTAL, Université Catholique de Louvain, place Blaise Pascal 1, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
E-mail: micha@cis.uni-muenchen.de, mehdi.bouraoui@uclouvain.be, patrick.watrin@uclouvain.be
Abstract
Within this paper, we describe the special requirements of a semantic annotation scheme used for biographical event extraction in the
framework of the European collaborative research project Biographe. This annotation scheme supports interlingual search for people
due to its multilingual support covering four languages such as English, German, French and Dutch.
Keywords: biographical event extraction for interlingual people search, semantic annotation scheme
1. Introduction
In everyday life, people search is frequently used for
private interests such as locating classmates and old
friends, finding partners for relationships or checking
someone’s background.
1.1. People Search within Business Context
In a business context, finding the right person with the
appropriate skills and knowledge is often crucial to the
success of projects being undertaken (Mockus &
Herbsleb, 2002). For instance, an employee may want to
ascertain who worked on a particular project to find out
why particular decisions were made without having to
crawl through documentation (if there is any). Or, he may
require a highly trained specialist to consult about a very
specific problem in a particular programming language,
standard, law, etc. Identifying experts may reduce costs
and facilitate a better solution than could be achieved
otherwise.
Possible scenarios could be the following ones:
� A personnel officer wants to find information about a
person who applied for a specific position and has to
collect additional career-related information about
the applicant;
� A company requires a description of the
state-of-the-art in some field and, therefore, wants to
locate an expert this knowledge area;
� An enterprise has to set up an additional team
supporting an existing group and has to find new
employees with similar expertise;
� Organizers of a conference have to match
submissions with reviewers;
� Job centers or even labor bureaus are interested in
mapping appropriate job offers to personal data
sheets.
These scenarios demonstrate that it is a real challenge
within any commercial, scientific, or governmental
organization to manage the expertise of employees such
that experts in a particular area can be identified.
1.2. Background: The Biographe Project
A step beyond document retrieval, people search is
restricted to person-related facts. The Biographe project 1
develops grammar-based analysis tools to extract
person-related facts in four languages (English, German,
French, and Dutch). The project received the Eurostars 2
label in 2009. Kick-off has been given in March 2010 and
the project lasts for 24 months. The research consortium
is composed of four companies and two public research
departments, based in four European countries (France,
Belgium, Germany, and Austria). The team creates a
multipurpose people search platform able to reconstruct
biographies of people. It uses all available information
1
http://www.biographe.org
2 http://www.eurostars-eureka.eu
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