Building a Corpus of Indefinite Uses Annotated with Fine-grained Semantic Functions

Maria Aloni, Andreas van Cranenburgh, Raquel Fernández, Marta Sznajder


Abstract
Natural languages possess a wealth of indefinite forms that typically differ in distribution and interpretation. Although formal semanticists have strived to develop precise meaning representations for different indefinite functions, to date there has hardly been any corpus work on the topic. In this paper, we present the results of a small corpus study where English indefinite forms `any' and `some' were labelled with fine-grained semantic functions well-motivated by typological studies. We developed annotation guidelines that could be used by non-expert annotators and calculated inter-annotator agreement amongst several coders. The results show that the annotation task is hard, with agreement scores ranging from 52% to 62% depending on the number of functions considered, but also that each of the independent annotations is in accordance with theoretical predictions regarding the possible distributions of indefinite functions. The resulting annotated corpus is available upon request and can be accessed through a searchable online database.
Anthology ID:
L12-1178
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1511–1515
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/362_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maria Aloni, Andreas van Cranenburgh, Raquel Fernández, and Marta Sznajder. 2012. Building a Corpus of Indefinite Uses Annotated with Fine-grained Semantic Functions. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 1511–1515, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Building a Corpus of Indefinite Uses Annotated with Fine-grained Semantic Functions (Aloni et al., LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/362_Paper.pdf