Coping with Construals in Broad-Coverage Semantic Annotation of Adpositions

TL;DR

This paper revisits semantic annotation of prepositions, proposing a framework to explicitly represent construal phenomena at the token level to improve annotation consistency and support automatic language processing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel annotation framework that captures both scene roles and lexical functions of adpositions, addressing limitations of previous schemes.

Findings

Framework supports large-scale annotation of adpositions.

Enables better automatic processing of semantic roles.

Addresses cross-linguistic and problematic cases in English.

Abstract

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.