In this paper, we present and test an annotation scheme designed to analyse the semantic properties of derived nouns in context. Aiming at a general semantic comparison of morphological processes, we use a descriptive model that seeks to capture semantic regularities among lexemes and affixes, rather than match occurrences to word sense inventories. We annotate two distinct features of target words: the ontological type of the entity they denote and their semantic relationship with the word they derive from. As illustrated through an annotation experiment on French corpus data, this procedure allows us to highlight semantic differences and similarities between affixes by investigating the number and frequency of their semantic functions, as well as the relation between affix polyfunctionality and lexical ambiguity.

French, as many languages, lacks semantically annotated corpus data. Our aim is to provide the linguistic and NLP research communities with a gold standard sense-annotated corpus of French, using WordNet Unique Beginners as semantic tags, thus allowing for interoperability. In this paper, we report on the first phase of the project, which focused on the annotation of common nouns. The resulting dataset consists of more than 12,000 French noun occurrences which were annotated in double blind and adjudicated according to a carefully redefined set of supersenses. The resource is released online under a Creative Commons Licence.

The Asfalda project aims to develop a French corpus with frame-based semantic annotations and automatic tools for shallow semantic analysis. We present the first part of the project: focusing on a set of notional domains, we delimited a subset of English frames, adapted them to French data when necessary, and developed the corresponding French lexicon. We believe that working domain by domain helped us to enforce the coherence of the resulting resource, and also has the advantage that, though the number of frames is limited (around a hundred), we obtain full coverage within a given domain.