--- title: "OntoNotes: The 90% Solution — Pradhan 2009" description: "This NAACL HLT 2009 tutorial abstract presents OntoNotes, a resource that gives NLP research a shallow but wide-ranging representation of sentence meaning." authors: ["Sameer S. Pradhan", "Nianwen Xue"] year: 2009 venue: "Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Companion Volume: Tutorial Abstracts" source: "https://aclanthology.org/N09-4006/" licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/pradhan-2009-ontonotes-90-solution/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/pradhan-2009-ontonotes-90-solution/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/) / [2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2009/) / OntoNotes: The 90% Solution # OntoNotes: The 90% Solution **Authors:** [Sameer S. Pradhan](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/sameer-s-pradhan/), [Nianwen Xue](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/nianwen-xue/) · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Companion Volume: Tutorial Abstracts · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/N09-4006/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/N09-4006.pdf) **Citations:** [20](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary This NAACL HLT 2009 tutorial abstract presents OntoNotes, a resource that gives NLP research a shallow but wide-ranging representation of sentence meaning. It reports no experiments. Instead, it describes a corpus built by a five-year collaboration among BBN Technologies, USC's Information Sciences Institute, the University of Colorado, the University of Pennsylvania and Brandeis University. The data combine several annotation layers: Treebank syntax, PropBank predicate-argument structure, ontology-linked word senses, names and coreference. They cover English, Chinese and Arabic across four genres. Annotation design sought a balance between inter-annotator agreement, annotation throughput and depth of representation. Many applications need several layers at once, so the corpus is stored in a relational (MySQL) database that keeps layers consistent while letting each one exist on its own. An object-oriented Python API, with classes mirroring the database tables, wraps the database. The tutorial covers the layers, cross-language differences, the schema and the API, and ends with hands-on cross-layer querying. Its significance is that it offers large, high-quality, multilingual, multi-layer data in an integrated, programmable form. ## Key points - The document is a two-page tutorial abstract (Tutorials, pp. 11–12). It was written when the DARPA GALE OntoNotes project was in its third year, and it contains no quantitative results. - **Languages:** English, Chinese and Arabic. - **Genres:** four text types, namely weblogs, broadcast conversation, broadcast news and newswire. - **Annotation layers:** Treebank, PropBank, word sense, names, coreference and an ontology. Question answering and machine translation are named as target applications. - **Infrastructure:** a MySQL database schema (with ER diagram) interconnects the layers while keeping each one independent, which supports multi-site work. A Python API maps classes to tables and can be extended with new layers. - **Hands-on session:** participants load a database from a MySQL dump, build Python objects for the layers, run cross-layer queries and write modified data back. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [Semantic role labeling](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/semantic-role-labeling/) ## Cited by Cited by 20 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 4 of them have a page here, 16 not yet. - [Multi-source annotation projection of coreference chains: assessing strategies and testing opportunities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/grishina-2017-multi-source-annotation-projection-coreference/) - [Datasets: A Community Library for Natural Language Processing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/lhoest-2021-datasets-community-library-natural-language/) - [Towards Semi-Automated Annotation for Prepositional Phrase Attachment](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/lingbulk-2010-rosenthal-semi-automated-annotation-prepositional-phrase/) - [Does String-Based Neural MT Learn Source Syntax?](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/shi-2016-does-string-based-neural-mt/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{pradhan2009ontonotes, title = {{OntoNotes: The 90\% Solution}}, author = {Pradhan, Sameer S. and Xue, Nianwen}, booktitle = {Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Companion Volume: Tutorial Abstracts}, year = {2009}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/N09-4006/} } ``` - [← previous Not a Simple Yes or No: Uncertainty in Indirect Answers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/marneffe-2009-not-simple-yes-or-no/) - [next → Optimization in Coreference Resolution is not Needed: A Nearly-Optimal Algorithm with Intensional Constraints](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/klenner-2009-optimization-coreference-resolution-is-not/) - [↑ back to papers of 2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2009/)