Abstract
In this paper, we present first results from annotating abstract (discourse-deictic) anaphora in German. Our annotation guidelines provide linguistic tests for identifying the antecedent, and for determining the semantic types of both the antecedent and the anaphor. The corpus consists of selected speaker turns from the Europarl corpus. To date, 100 texts have been annotated according to these guidelines. The annotations show that anaphoric personal and demonstrative pronouns differ with respect to the distance to their antecedents. A semantic analysis reveals that, contrary to suggestions put forward in the literature, referents of anaphors do not tend to be more abstract than the referents of their antecedents.
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Notes
In an earlier version of the guidelines (cf. Dipper and Zinsmeister 2009), annotators had to determine the semantic types of the antecedents via reference to a table that listed 10 types of propositional entities, such as event, process, state, fact (see e.g., Asher 1993; Maienborn 2003; Vendler 1967). Annotators had to select an entity on the basis of features like world-dependent, time-dependent, dynamic, telic, and by applying linguistic tests from theoretical semantic work, such as “Is it possible to add frequency adverbials like ‘three times’, or time frames like ‘within one hour’, or time spans like ‘for one hour’?” (Dowty 1979). These tests, however, proved very difficult to apply to naturally occurring sentences. Therefore, the annotation criteria were redesigned as described in the text.
For the task of classifying abstract anaphor versus the rest, we achieve an inter-annotator agreement of κ = .79 (computed according to Artstein and Poesio 2008).
According to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, antecedent lengths for das versus dies do not differ significantly, but they do if compared to es: D = .36, p < .01 (das versus es); D = .36, p < .05 (dies versus es).
Inter-annotator agreement for the task of identifying the antecedent is .40 (observed agreement on exact matches). If only the head verb of the antecedent is considered, agreement improves to .55, and measuring simple overlap yields .84.
According to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, distances associated with dies versus es do not differ significantly. Significant differences exist between das versus dies: D = .29, p < .01; and between das versus es: D = .36, p < .01.
For the annotation of semantic types in the NP Replacement Test, we achieved inter-annotator agreements of .75 for head noun classes and .77 for article classes. In the Colon Test, we achieved observed agreements of .70 for noun classes, .92 for article classes, and .86 for verb classes. For evaluating agreement, we consider both the first-to-the-mind choice as well as the alternative choice as equal candidates. If the annotators agree on any candidate, we consider it to be a match. As a consequence, we can only compute observed agreement but not expected agreement. The same holds for antecedent identification (see footnote 6).
If multiple or ambiguous paraphrases have been annotated, the most concrete type is chosen for antecedents, and the most abstract type for anaphors. This is done in order to satisfy the Abstractness Hypothesis.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and our student annotators: Iris Bräuning, Christine Rieger, and Melanie Seiß. The work reported here was in part supported by Europäischer Sozialfonds in Baden-Württemberg, by the Rectorate’s Fund of Ruhr-University Bochum, and by the Young Scholar Fund of the University of Konstanz’s Excellence Initiative.
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Dipper, S., Zinsmeister, H. Annotating abstract anaphora. Lang Resources & Evaluation 46, 37–52 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-011-9160-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-011-9160-1