Events and their anchors.  In these HITs you will be asked to identify events that are mentioned in sentences.  Events involve change, and as such are often expressed via verbs, such as:

    "John walked up the stairs" (John's location has changed)

    "Mary painted the wall" (the wall has become painted)

In this task we are not concerned about whether an event has actually occurred -- it is enough that an event is mentioned in any context.  So, for example, it doesn't matter whether an event is mentioned within a context that is hypothetical ("If John walks up the stairs, he will get tired."), or is in the future ("Mary will paint that wall next week.") or even when a sentence explicitly states that an event has not happened ("The bird did not fly out of its cage.").  In all these contexts an event is still worthy of being identified for the purposes of this task, since it indicates that the text is talking about an event of some type.

Events can be mentioned in a wide variety of ways within a sentence, whether as verbs as noted above, or as nouns ("Steve's car repair was expensive."), adjectives ("The injured bird was named Hector.") or in other ways.  A single sentence can mention zero, one, or multiple events ("The injured bird was carried to the examination table by the woman who had seen the accident."), and can also refer to the same event in multiple ways.

To indicate an event you will be asked to verify (or actively select) the word(s) that provide the key indication of the event having been mentioned, which we call the event anchor.   Examples of event anchors are underlined in all the example sentences used above.  Notice that the event anchor phrase does not need to include any additional helping verbs or prepositions that are not essential to conveying the mention of an event itself.  (This is consistent with the notion that events are to be identified without regard to their "epistemic status" -- whether or not they are asserted as having happened or not.)  So, for example, in the sentence "Patty wouldn't have walked that direction," the anchor can exclude the previous two words that are used to convey modality and tense.

In addition to events that capture material change in the world, this task also requires the identification of events that are mostly or purely verbal or that attribute thoughts or beliefs to sentient actors. These are often anchored by verbs like "said", "announced", "thinks", or "believes".

A description of a state of affairs, often indicated by an "is" or "has" verb, is not a taggable event. Examples of states of affairs are things like: "The sky is blue.", "John has brown eyes.", or "Justin Trudeau is Prime Minister of Canada." Note that we do annotate events that mark a change in a state of affairs, such as "Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015."

Event agents. When an event is mentioned, it will often include an indication of the person, organization or other kind of thing that brought about the event, such as "The angry students" (highlighted in yellow here and elsewhere) in sentence "The angry students protested on the campus of the University of Fantasia."  We call these the "agents" of events.  You will be asked to identify the agent (or set of agents) involved in an event, if they are mentioned.  Agents will not always be mentioned, such as in sentence "The protest did not seem to have a specific goal."

While agents will often be indicated through being the subjects of active verbs, this is not always a reliable way of determining their role.  Instead, one should consider for each event what person (or group of people, organization or other actor, or even what event or state of affairs) brought about the change that is described by the event.  Consider: "The car was repaired by Mr. Smith.", "Mr. Smith died from pneumonia.", and "Mr. Smith's arrest by Lexington police this morning has been widely reported."

Event patients.  Some events indicate the thing or things that were changed or otherwise affected by virtue of the event, such as "the community center" (highlighted in cyan here and elsewhere) in the sentence "John and Mary painted the community center, which had needed it for many years."  (Notice that this event has two separate agents -- John and Mary, annotated separately rather than as a single conjunctive phrase.)  Other examples:  "Rioters overturned a blue Cadillac.", "The students shoplifted cosmetics and health-care products."

In the case of ditransitive verbs (verbs that take two objects), the patient is the entity impacted by the event. This is typically the indirect object, and the other (typically the direct object is not annotated). For example: "Sam gave his teacher a present.", "Mary passed the ball to Peter", and "Joan baked a cake for her brother." This guideline also applies to nominalizations or other representations of this type of event, for example: "The gift of the book to the baby from his grandparents was a sentimental offering."

Events can be agents or patients of other events.  For example: "The snowstorm prevented the students from writing their exams on Friday." Here the patient of the prevented event is the writing event ("the students [from] writing their exams"). In this case we use the shortcut of annotating the event anchor (writing) as a proxy for the whole event, as the patient (or agent). 

When an event of speech or belief is identified, the patient of the event should be identified as the main event or proposition being asserted or believed.  For example: "The court announced that the hearing room had been filled." or "The judge believes the witness lied on the stand."  In the examples above, the patient of announced is the filled event ("the hearing room had been filled"), and the patient of believes is the lied event ("the witness lied").  The patient of an assertion/belief event can also be a state of affairs that is not an event, such as "Don announced that the sky is pink.

Agent and Patient Span Extents.  While event anchors are to be identified through the minimal set of words necessary to clearly identify the nature of the event (and ignoring any words conveying tense or other modifying information), agents and patients should be identified through the full noun phrase used to describe them, including determiners ("the", "a", "any", "their", "those", etc.) and pre-nominal modifiers (such as adjectives), but excluding any additional dependent clauses (such as those using "which" or "that", such as in "Mary Smith, who was often late to meetings, sat down at the head of the table.")

Normally we exclude post-nominal prepositional phrases, such as "Three armed robbers from Switzerland" or "John Smith of Generic Corporation".  The intent is to exclude clauses that are not needed to make clear the meaning of the head noun -- if the phrase or clause could sensibly be set off with commas or parentheses, do not include it.  However, when there is a function word that requires a completion such as "members of" or "president of" we keep the post-nominal clause:  "Eight members of the Polar Bear club" or "The president of the board".

Please study the additional examples in the next tab before proceeding to the test items.

The table below contains a set of examples with additional guidelines for properly identifying events and their anchors, agents and patients. Where a sentence contains multiple events, each event is described in a separate row in the table.

Once you have studied the instructions and thes additional examples, you may proceed to the test items in the next tab. You may return to the instructions or additional examples at any time while completing the test.

Please answer the following questions to the best of your ability based on what you've learned in the instructions and from studying the additional examples. You may return to the instructions or additional examples at any time while completing the test. You will be paid if you get at least half of the items on this test correct, but only high scores will allow you to perform subsequent HITs.