Richer Event Description: Integrating event coreference with temporal, causal and bridging annotation

There have been a wide range of recent annotated corpora concerning events, either regarding event coreference, the temporal order of events, hierarchical "subevent" structure of events, or causal relationships between events. However, although some believe that these different phenomena will display rich interactions, relatively few corpora annotate all of those layers of annotation in a unified fashion. This paper describes the annotation methodology for the Richer Event Descriptions corpus, which annotates entities, events, times, their coreference and partial coreference relations, and the temporal, causal and subevent relationships between the events. It suggests that such rich annotations of within-document event phenomena can be built with high quality through a multi-stage annotation pipeline, and that the resultant corpus could be useful for systems hoping to transition from the detection of isolated mentions of events toward a richer understanding of events grounded in the temporal, causal, referential and bridging relations that define them.