Une expérience de fusion pour l'annotation d'entités nommées

In this paper, we present an experiment aimed at merging named entity annotations provided by different annotators. This work has been performed as part of the Infom@gic project, whose goal is the integration and validation of knowledge engineering and information analysis applications, and which is supported by the pole of competitiveness Cap Digital « Image, MultiMédia et Vie Numérique ». We first describe the four annotators, which provide named entity annotations that conform to guidelines defined in the Infom@gic project. Then we present an algorithm for merging the different annotations. It uses information about the compatibility of various annotations and can point out conflicts, and thus yields annotations that are more reliable than those of any single annotator. We conclude by describing and interpreting the merging results obtained on a manually annotated reference corpus.