Annotation of epidemiological information in animal disease-related news articles: guidelines
This provides a tool for researchers and public health officials to systematically analyze news data for disease surveillance, but it is incremental as it builds on existing annotation practices.
The paper tackles the problem of extracting epidemiological information from animal disease-related news articles by proposing a generic annotation method that works across all animal or zoonotic infectious diseases, resulting in a framework for sentence-by-sentence annotation in context.
This paper describes a method for annotation of epidemiological information in animal disease-related news articles. The annotation guidelines are generic and aim to embrace all animal or zoonotic infectious diseases, regardless of the pathogen involved or its way of transmission (e.g. vector-borne, airborne, by contact). The framework relies on the successive annotation of all the sentences from a news article. The annotator evaluates the sentences in a specific epidemiological context, corresponding to the publication of the news article.