Supersense and Sensibility: Proxy Tasks for Semantic Annotation of Prepositions

TL;DR

This paper introduces two proxy tasks—surface substitution and similarity judgments—to efficiently annotate prepositional supersenses, aiming to reduce expert effort while maintaining annotation quality.

Contribution

It proposes novel, practical methods for semantic annotation of prepositions that are comparable to expert annotations, facilitating scalable linguistic analysis.

Findings

Both methods show potential for high-quality annotations

Pilot studies indicate comparable quality to expert annotations

Methods are efficient and scalable for semantic annotation

Abstract

Prepositional supersense annotation is time-consuming and requires expert training. Here, we present two sensible methods for obtaining prepositional supersense annotations by eliciting surface substitution and similarity judgments. Four pilot studies suggest that both methods have potential for producing prepositional supersense annotations that are comparable in quality to expert annotations.