stanfordnlp/CoreNLP · error · RuntimeException

Invalid relation mention argument role

Error message

Invalid relation mention argument role: ${role}

What it means

An ACE corpus parsing failure in AceDomReader.parseRelationMention: a relation_mention_argument's ROLE attribute is not one of the recognized roles (arg-1, arg-2, etc.), meaning the ACE XML contains a relation argument role the reader does not map into mention args.

Solutions

1. Extend parseRelationMention to handle additional roles or ignore unsupported ones instead of throwing.
2. Filter relations with unsupported roles in a preprocessing pass over the .apf.xml files.
3. Check the corpus version — standard ACE2005 relations only use arg-1/arg-2; a third role indicates a nonstandard or corrupted file.
4. Normalize role casing (already case-insensitive here) and strip whitespace before the check if files contain stray whitespace.

Example fix

// before
} else {
  throw new RuntimeException("Invalid relation mention argument role: " + role);
}
// after
} else {
  logger.warning("Ignoring unsupported relation role: " + role);
}

Set<String> allowed = Set.of("arg-1", "arg-2");
if (!allowed.contains(role.toLowerCase())) { logger.warning("unsupported role: " + role); return; }

try { parseRelationMention(...); } catch (RuntimeException e) { logger.warning("skipping relation: " + e.getMessage()); }

When it happens

Trigger: Parsing an ACE .apf.xml relation that contains an argument with a role other than arg-1/arg-2 (case-insensitive), e.g. time or place arguments, or a corpus variant emitting different role names.

Common situations: Processing ACE corpora or extensions with extra relation argument types, annotation tools writing roles in a different convention (e.g. 'Arg', 'ARG'), custom relation types added to the corpus.

Understand the failure class

Background: Invalid enum value errors: "Unknown type", "Invalid scope", "must be one of" — when a string is not on the library's allowed list — this error's family across 23 libraries.

Related errors

• Match failed!
• Bad data format:
• attempt to get word when sentence and lattice are null!
• Attempt to use ExternalFiniteDifference without passing…
• Attempted to parse empty/null tag

AI-assisted analysis of stanfordnlp/CoreNLP@1b7edd19c4 (2026-09-10). Data as JSON: /api/errors/ea3420179e7ed701. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at src/edu/stanford/nlp/ie/machinereading/domains/ace/reader/AceDomReader.java:77

    // create the mention
    AceRelationMention mention = new AceRelationMention(id, extent, lc);

    // find the mention args
    List<Node> args = getChildrenByName(node, "relation_mention_argument");
    for(Node arg: args){
      String role = getAttributeValue(arg, "ROLE");
      String refid = getAttributeValue(arg, "REFID");
      AceEntityMention am = doc.getEntityMention(refid);

      if(am != null){
      	am.addRelationMention(mention);
      	if(role.equalsIgnoreCase("arg-1")){
      		mention.getArgs()[0] = new AceRelationMentionArgument(role, am);
      	} else if(role.equalsIgnoreCase("arg-2")){
      		mention.getArgs()[1] = new AceRelationMentionArgument(role, am);
      	} else {
      		throw new RuntimeException("Invalid relation mention argument role: " + role);
      	}
      }
    }

    return mention;
  }

  /**
   * Extracts info about one relation mention
   */
  private static AceEventMention parseEventMention(Node node,
               AceDocument doc) {
    String id = getAttributeValue(node, "ID");
    AceCharSeq extent = parseCharSeq(getChildByName(node, "extent"));
    AceCharSeq anchor = parseCharSeq(getChildByName(node, "anchor"));

    // create the mention
    AceEventMention mention = new AceEventMention(id, extent, anchor);

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