Coping with Construals in Broad-Coverage Semantic Annotation of Adpositions
This work addresses a foundational problem in computational linguistics for researchers and practitioners dealing with semantic annotation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing annotation schemes.
The paper tackles the challenge of semantic annotation for adpositions by proposing a framework that separates scene roles from lexical functions to manage complexity and avoid sense proliferation, enabling scalable annotation for automatic processing of domain-general language.
We consider the semantics of prepositions, revisiting a broad-coverage annotation scheme used for annotating all 4,250 preposition tokens in a 55,000 word corpus of English. Attempts to apply the scheme to adpositions and case markers in other languages, as well as some problematic cases in English, have led us to reconsider the assumption that a preposition's lexical contribution is equivalent to the role/relation that it mediates. Our proposal is to embrace the potential for construal in adposition use, expressing such phenomena directly at the token level to manage complexity and avoid sense proliferation. We suggest a framework to represent both the scene role and the adposition's lexical function so they can be annotated at scale---supporting automatic, statistical processing of domain-general language---and sketch how this representation would inform a constructional analysis.