Event99: a Proposed Event Indexing Task for Broadcast News

The goal of the proposed Event99 task is to evaluate event-level indexing into news stories, including news wire, radio, and television sources. The Event99 task is distinguished from earlier, related evaluations in its focus on indexing, its application to multiple media, and the relative extensibility of its task definition to new event types. The task involves identifying instances of high-interest event types, along with some basic attributes of the events (e.g., actors, effects, date, location). The current guidelines include sample event definitions for death, natural disaster and bombing events, with other event types under development. The output from the task is primarily designed to support event-based browsing and search, but the human-prepared key also provides a kind of topic-specific summarization. This paper provides background concerning the task design, an overview of the definition, annotation and scoring of the task, results of an interannotator agreement study, and information concerning current status and schedule.