A Stragety for Annotating in GATE

Before you begin annotating, it will make your life easier if you start by checking the boxes for the agent, on, expressive-subjectivity, and split annotations. It will also make your life easier if you sort the annotations by their starting byte, so that you can more easily keep track of your annotations.

The basic recommendation is to proceed sentence by sentence and to perform the steps below for each sentence. Of course, they are meant only as a recommendation and you should do whatever works best for you.

1. First, look at annotations that pertain to the writer of the document as a whole.
   1. Find and annotate all expressive-subjectivity for the writer. Edit the annotations, setting the nested-source and intensity features. Set the polarity-type feature if, in context, the expressive-subjective element is expressing a negative or positive attitude, or expresses a combination of both positive and negative attitudes.

   2. Use the writer's expressive-subjectivity annotations from the previous step to help determine if the sentence-level private state annotation for the writer should be a DSE or an OSE. You need to make a change only if the annotation for the writer is DSE since by default an OSE-annotation is provided. If you do change the type from OSE to DSE, also remember to set the other appropriate features such as intensity. Of course, when the DSE is implicit, you do not need to specify a value for the feature expression-intensity.

   3. Apply attitude and target labels as per Theresa's instructions. Make sure that for each attitude you specify at least
      1. id
      2. attitude-type
      3. intensity
      4. target-link

   4. Label the appropriate target span and give it an id. If you are unsure that the span really functions as the target of the attitude to which you are linking the target in question, then set the target-uncertain feature.

   5. Also make sure that after completing an attitude annotation, you enter its id into the attitude-link field of the relevant DSE annotation frame.

   6. If the attitude you marked was an inferred one, don't forget to set the inferred feature to ``yes''.

2. Turn to the more deeply embedded nested-sources in the sentence. These will be typically mentioned overtly but might be implicit.
   1. Identify in the sentence all other direct mentions of private state and speech events that meet the criteria for annotation. That is, find OSEs and DSEs.

   2. For every private state/speech event that you identified in the previous step, annotate
      1. the span of text that evokes the private state/speech event
      2. the span of text that refers to the agent that is the source
      3. any spans of text that are expressive-subjectivity attributed to the source of the private state/speech event

   3. Edit the agent annotations that you just added, providing an id if needed, and setting the nested-source feature. Make sure that if the agent appears as a source for the first time, you also find the first descriptive reference to that agent in the text and mark it, giving it its initial id.

   4. Edit the expressive-subjectivity annotations that you just added, setting the nested-source and intensity features. Set the polarity feature if in context, the expressive- subjective element is expressing a negative or positive attitude.

   5. If the OSE or DSE is implicit, set the implicit feature to ``true''. A common situation in which an embedded source and their private state expression go unexpressed is when a sentence continues a quote as in the second sentence of this example:

      (1) ``That is a pessimistic assessment, but it may be realistic,'' he wrote in an email. (2) ``Look, for example, at the E.U. where, ... total E.U. emissions are now, once again, inching back up.''

   6. Specify the nested-source for OSEs and DSEs.

   7. If you are annotating a DSE, specify the expression-intensity and intensity features. (Omit expression-intensity if the DSE is implicit.)

   8. If the source of a DSE is expressing any kind of attitude, you need to start adding attitude labels and, where appropriate, target labels, and link them appropriately.

   9. If an attitude you marked was inferred, remember to set the inferred feature to ``yes''.

3. Things to keep in mind
   1. Often, when you have an ESE marked on a sentence you will also have an attitude.
   2. We can mark attitudes that are inferred-think of the classical case of ``People are happy that Chavez fell''.
   3. A single private state expression may have multiple attitude annotations associated with it.
   4. If you mark an attitude as inferred, then you should also have another attitude present that is not inferred.
   5. Many annotation frames allow you to mark uncertainty. If you really are uncertain, use the appropriate fields.