GAF: A Grounded Annotation Framework for Events

This paper introduces GAF, a grounded annotation framework to represent events in a formal context that can represent information from both textual and extra-textual sources. GAF makes a clear distinction between mentions of events in text and their formal representation as instances in a semantic layer. Instances are represented by RDF compliant URIs that are shared across different research disciplines. This allows us to complete textual information with external sources and facilitates reasoning. The semantic layer can integrate any linguistic information and is compatible with previous event representations in NLP. Through a use case on earthquakes in Southeast Asia, we demonstrate GAF flexibility and ability to reason over events with the aid of extra-linguistic resources.