A Corpus Study and Annotation Schema for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction of Business Products

Recognizing non-standard entity types and relations, such as B2B products,\nproduct classes and their producers, in news and forum texts is important in\napplication areas such as supply chain monitoring and market research. However,\nthere is a decided lack of annotated corpora and annotation guidelines in this\ndomain. In this work, we present a corpus study, an annotation schema and\nassociated guidelines, for the annotation of product entity and company-product\nrelation mentions. We find that although product mentions are often realized as\nnoun phrases, defining their exact extent is difficult due to high boundary\nambiguity and the broad syntactic and semantic variety of their surface\nrealizations. We also describe our ongoing annotation effort, and present a\npreliminary corpus of English web and social media documents annotated\naccording to the proposed guidelines.\n