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Relationship Annotation

How to annotate relationships and coreference

Written by Tal Perry. Updated over a week ago

As in life, so in annotation, relationships are hard but rewarding. And as in life, so in annotation, there is a lot you can do to make relationships easier and even more rewarding.

We can't help you with your personal relationships but we can make relationships much easier.

Making A Relationship Between Two Entities

To form a relationship between two entities, click and drag the label of one entity and drag it onto another.

Drag and drop relationship annotation with LightTag

LightTag maintains a "parent-child" structure. If that is important to you, then the node you click and drag will be the child, and then node you drop it on will be the parent.

Forming Relationships Between Multiple Entities

To express complex relationships, drag an entity on to the bottom of an existing item in the relationship tree to make it a child, or at the top of an existing item to make it a parent.

Composing Relationships

It's often easier to build a larger relationship tree from smaller parts. You can create multiple small trees and then compose them by dragging one tree onto another

Specifying How Things Are Related (Edge Labels)

If your job is configured for it, you will be able to specify how items are related.

To do so:

  1. Extend the left column by clicking and dragging on the drag icon

  2. Select the relation types list (it will only appear if the job was configured for it)

  3. Choose the relation type that you want to apply

  4. Double click on the child in three that you want to add the relation to

Grouping Relations (Non-terminals)

Sometimes you'll want to group together items with an annotation that is not in the text. One common use case is grouping together multiple items to form an event:

Nested Annotations

Another common use case is dealing with nested annotations.

For example, you might want to annotate the United State Post Office as an organization, but capture that the United States is a country. You could do that with groupings

Coreference

Another common use case is annotating multiple coreference chains