Description of the Odin Event Extraction Framework and Rule Language

This document describes the Odin framework, which is a domain-independent platform for developing rule-based event extraction models. Odin aims to be powerful (the rule language allows the modeling of complex syntactic structures) and robust (to recover from syntactic parsing errors, syntactic patterns can be freely mixed with surface, token-based patterns), while remaining simple (some domain grammars can be up and running in minutes), and fast (Odin processes over 100 sentences/second in a real-world domain with over 200 rules). Here we include a thorough definition of the Odin rule language, together with a description of the Odin API in the Scala language, which allows one to apply these rules to arbitrary texts.