A Gold Standard Dataset for Geo-semantic Annotation of Diderot & d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie
This dataset contains semantic annotations (at the token and span levels) for named entities (such as Spatial, Person, and MISC), nominal entities, as well as nested named entities, spatial relations, and other relevant information within French encyclopedic entries.
The span tagset is as follows:
ville, la rivière, royaume.France, Paris, la Chine.ville de France, royaume de Naples, la mer Baltique.dans, sur, à 10 lieues de.Long. 19. 49. lat. 43. 55. 44.roi, l'empereur, les auteurs.Louis XIV, Pline, les Romains.le czar Pierre, roi de Macédoinel'Eglise, 1702, Pélasgique.l'ordre de S. Jacques, la déclaration du 21 Mars 1671.Géographie, Geog., en Anatomie.token-classification or span-classification: The dataset can be used to train a model for token-classification or span-classification.
It is more specifically designed for spatial role labelling. A spacy custom spancat model is available at: https://huggingface.co/GEODE/fr_spacy_custom_spancat_edda.The dataset is provided as JSONL files[^1] where each row follows the following structure:
{
"text": "ILLESCAS, (Géog.) petite ville d'Espagne <...> ",
"meta": {"volume": 8, "head": "ILLESCAS", "author": "unsigned", "domain_article": "Géographie", "domain_paragraph": "Géographie", "article": 2637, "paragraph": 1},
"tokens": [{"text": "ILLESCAS", "start": 0, "end": 8, "id": 0, "ws": false}, {"text": ",", "start": 8, "end": 9, "id": 1, "ws": true}, {"text": "(", "start": 10, "end": 11, "id": 2, "ws": false}, {"text": "Géog", "start": 11, "end": 15, "id": 3, "ws": false}, {"text": ".", "start": 15, "end": 16, "id": 4, "ws": false}, {"text": ")", "start": 16, "end": 17, "id": 5, "ws": true}, {"text": "petite", "start": 18, "end": 24, "id": 6, "ws": true}, {"text": "ville", "start": 25, "end": 30, "id": 7, "ws": true}, {"text": "d'", "start": 31, "end": 33, "id": 8, "ws": false}, {"text": "Espagne", "start": 33, "end": 40, "id": 9, "ws": false}, {"text": ",", "start": 40, "end": 41, "id": 10, "ws": true} <...>],
"spans": [{"text": "ILLESCAS", "start": 0, "end": 8, "token_start": 0, "token_end": 0, "label": "Head"}, {"text": "Géog.", "start": 11, "end": 16, "token_start": 3, "token_end": 4, "label": "Domain-mark"}, {"text": "petite ville", "start": 18, "end": 30, "token_start": 6, "token_end": 7, "label": "NC-Spatial"}, {"text": "petite ville d'Espagne", "start": 18, "end": 40, "token_start": 6, "token_end": 9, "label": "ENE-Spatial"}, {"text": "petite ville d'Espagne, dans la nouvelle Castille", "start": 18, "end": 67, "token_start": 6, "token_end": 14, "label": "ENE-Spatial"}, {"text": "Espagne", "start": 33, "end": 40, "token_start": 9, "token_end": 9, "label": "NP-Spatial"}, <...>]
}
Each data contains four main fields:
text: plain text of a paragraph.meta: metadata from the ARTFL Encyclopédie about the paragraph such volume, article, paragraph id, headword, etc.tokens: list of tokens, with their text, id, start and end position at the character level.spans: list of spans (i.e., annotations), with their text, label, start and end position at the character level.[^1]:spaCy binary files are also available on the Github and Zenodo repositories.
The dataset consists of 2200 paragraphs randomly selected out of 2001 Encyclopédie's entries. All paragraphs were written in French and are distributed as follows among the Encyclopédie knowledge domains:
| Knowledge domain | Paragraphs | |---|:---:| | Géographie | 1096 | | Histoire | 259 | | Droit Jurisprudence | 113 | | Physique | 92 | | Métiers | 92 | | Médecine | 88 | | Philosophie | 69 | | Histoire naturelle | 65 | | Belles-lettres | 65 | | Militaire | 62 | | Commerce | 48 | | Beaux-arts | 44 | | Agriculture | 36 | | Chasse | 31 | | Religion | 23 | | Musique | 17 |
The spans/entities were labeled by the project team along with using pre-labelling with early models to speed up the labelling process. A train/val/test split was used. Validation and test sets are composed of 200 paragraphs each: 100 classified as 'Géographie' and 100 from another knowledge domain. The datasets have the following breakdown of tokens and spans/entities.
| | Train | Validation | Test| |---|:---:|:---:|:---:| |Paragraphs| 1,800 | 200 | 200| | Tokens | 132,398 | 14,959 | 13,881 | | NC-Spatial | 3,252 | 358 | 355 | | NP-Spatial | 4,707 | 464 | 519 | | ENE-Spatial | 3,043 | 326 | 334 | | Relation | 2,093 | 219 | 226 | | Latlong | 553 | 66 | 72 | | NC-Person | 1,378 | 132 | 133 | | NP-Person | 1,599 | 170 | 150 | | ENE-Person | 492 | 49 | 57 | | NP-Misc | 948 | 108 | 96 | | ENE-Misc | 255 | 31 | 22 | | Head | 1,261 | 142 | 153 | | Domain-Mark | 1,069 | 122 | 133 |
List of people involved in annotating the dataset:
Moncla, L., Vigier, D., & McDonough, K. (2024). GeoEDdA: A Gold Standard Dataset for Geo-semantic Annotation of Diderot & d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. In proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Geographic Information Extraction from Texts (GeoExT'24), ECIR Conference, Glasgow, UK.
The authors are grateful to the ASLAN project (ANR-10-LABX-0081) of the Université de Lyon, for its financial support within the French program "Investments for the Future" operated by the National Research Agency (ANR). Data courtesy the ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, University of Chicago.