Summary of the paper

Title Building a Corpus of Indefinite Uses Annotated with Fine-grained Semantic Functions
Authors Maria Aloni, Andreas van Cranenburgh, Raquel Fernandez and 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.
Topics Corpus (creation, annotation, etc.), Semantics, Typological databases
Full paper Building a Corpus of Indefinite Uses Annotated with Fine-grained Semantic Functions
Bibtex @InProceedings{ALONI12.362,
  author = {Maria Aloni and Andreas van Cranenburgh and Raquel Fernandez and Marta Sznajder},
  title = {Building a Corpus of Indefinite Uses Annotated with Fine-grained Semantic Functions},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)},
  year = {2012},
  month = {may},
  date = {23-25},
  address = {Istanbul, Turkey},
  editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Mehmet Uğur Doğan and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  isbn = {978-2-9517408-7-7},
  language = {english}
 }
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