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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Dear All,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">since this seems to be the first post on this list this year, I wish everybody a successful, more peaceful and decent year than the previous one.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">I want to raise an issue which gets back to a discussion from October 2023 on this list (see the thread below, in inverse chronological order). I’m interested to know whether
anybody has a satisfying answer to the question how to deal with semantic annotation, or the annotation of more complex (and less obvious) relations, in particular with the annotation of interclausal relations, both in terms of syntax and in semantic terms.
Problems arise already with the coordination-subordination gradient, which ultimately is an outcome of a complex bunch of semantic criteria (like independence of illocutionary force, perspective from which referential expressions like tense or person deixis
are interpreted; see also the factors that were analyzed meticulously, e.g., by Verstraete 2007). Other questions concern the coding of clause-initial “particles”: are they just particles, operators of “analytical mood”, or complementizers? (Notably, these
things do not exclude one another, but they heavily depend on one’s theory, in particular one’s stance toward complementation and mood.) Another case in point is the annotation of the functions and properties of constructions in TAME-domains, especially if
the annotation grid is more fine-grained than mainstream categorizing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"> The problems which I have encountered (in pilot studies) are very similar to those discussed in October 2023 for seemingly even “simpler”, or more coarse-grained
annotations. And they aggravate a lot when we turn to data from diachronic corpora: even if being an informed native speaker is usually an asset, with diachronic data this asset is often useless, and native knowledge may be even a hindrance since it leads
the analyst to project one’s habits and norms of contemporary usage to earlier stages of the “same” language. (Similar points apply for closely related languages.) I entirely agree that annotators have to be trained, and grids of annotation to be tested, first
of all because you have to exclude the (very likely) possibility that raters disagree just because some of the criteria are not clear to at least one of them (with the consequence that you cannot know whether disagreement or low Kappa doesn’t result from misunderstandings,
instead of reflecting properties of your object of study). I also agree that each criterion of a grid has to be sufficiently defined, and the annotation grid (or even its “history”) as such be documented in order to save objective criteria for replicability
and comparability (for cross-linguistic research, but also for diachronic studies based on a series of “synchronic cuts” of the given language).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">On this background, I’d like to formulate the following questions:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<ol style="margin-top:0cm" start="1" type="1">
<li class="MsoListParagraph" style="color:black;margin-left:0cm;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Which arguments are there that (informed) native speakers are better annotators than linguistically well-trained students/linguists who are not native speakers of the respective language(s), but can be considered
experts?<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoListParagraph" style="color:black;margin-left:0cm;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Conversely, which arguments are there that non-native speaker experts might be even better suited as annotators (for this or that kind of issue)?<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoListParagraph" style="color:black;margin-left:0cm;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Have assumptions about pluses and minuses of both kinds of annotators been tested in practice? That is, do we have empirical evidence for any such assumptions (or do we just rely on some sort of common sense,
or on the personal experience of those who have done more complicated annotation work)?<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoListParagraph" style="color:black;margin-left:0cm;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">How can pluses and minuses of both kinds of annotators be counterbalanced in a not too time (and money) consuming way?<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoListParagraph" style="color:black;margin-left:0cm;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">What can we do with data from diachronic corpora if we have to admit that (informed) native speakers are of no use, and non-native experts are not acknowledged, either? Are we just deemed to refrain from
any reliable and valid in-depth research based on annotations (and statistics) for diachronically earlier stages and for diachronic change?<o:p></o:p></span></li><li class="MsoListParagraph" style="color:black;margin-left:0cm;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo3">
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">In connection with this, has any cross-linguistic research that is interested in diachrony tried to implement insights from such fields like historical semantics and pragmatics into annotations? In typology,
linguistic change has increasingly become more prominent during the last 10-15 years (not only from a macro-perspective). I thus wonder whether typologists have tried to “borrow” methodology from fields that have possibly been better in interpreting diachronic
data, and even quantify them (to some extent).<o:p></o:p></span></li></ol>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">I don’t want to be too pessimistic, but if we have no good answers as for who should be doing annotations – informed native speakers or non-native experts (or only those
who are both native and experts)? – and how we might be able to test the validity of annotation grids (for comparisons across time and/or languages), there won’t be convincing arguments how to deal with diachronic data (or data of lesser studied languages
for which there might be no native speakers available) in empirical studies that are to disclose more fine-grained distinctions and changes, also in order to quantify them. In particular, reviewers of project applications may always ask for a convincing methodology,
and if no such research is funded we’ll remain ignorant of quite many reasons and backgrounds of language change.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">I’d appreciate advice, in particular if it provides answers to any of the questions under 1-6 above.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Best,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Björn (Wiemer).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Von:</span></b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"> Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org>
<b>Im Auftrag von </b>William Croft<br>
<b>Gesendet:</b> Montag, 16. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Oktober 2023 15:52<br>
<b>An:</b> Volker Gast <volker.gast@uni-jena.de><br>
<b>Cc:</b> LINGTYP@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG<br>
<b>Betreff:</b> Re: [Lingtyp] typology projects that use inter-rater reliability?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">An early cross-linguistic study with multiple annotators is this one:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="bibliography" style="mso-margin-top-alt:0cm;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:0cm;margin-left:18.0pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:-18.0pt">
<span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times",serif">Gundel, Jeannette K., Nancy Hedberg & Ron Zacharski.
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times",serif">1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. <i>Language</i> 69.274-307.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">It doesn’t have all the documentation that Volker suggests; our standards for providing documentation has risen.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">I have been involved in annotation projects in natural language processing, where the aim is to annotate corpora so that automated methods can “learn” the annotation categories from the “gold standard” (i.e. “expert”)
annotation -- this is supervised learning in NLP. Recent efforts are aiming at developing a single annotation scheme for use across languages, such as Universal Dependencies (for syntactic annotation), Uniform Meaning Representation (for semantic annotation),
and Unimorph (for morphological annotation). My experience is somewhat similar to Volker’s: even when the annotation scheme is very coarse-grained (from a theoretical linguist’s point of view), getting good enough interannotator agreement is hard, even when
the annotators are the ones who designed the scheme, or are native speakers or have done fieldwork on the language. I would add to Volker’s comments that one has to be trained for annotation; but that training can introduce (mostly implicit) bases, at least
in the eyes of proponents of a different theoretical approach -- something that is more apparent in a field such as linguistics where there are large differences in theoretical approaches.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Bill<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br>
<br>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<blockquote style="margin-top:5.0pt;margin-bottom:5.0pt">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">On Oct 16, 2023, at 6:02 AM, Volker Gast <</span><a href="mailto:volker.gast@uni-jena.de"><span lang="EN-US">volker.gast@uni-jena.de</span></a><span lang="EN-US">> wrote:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br>
Hey Adam (and others),<br>
<br>
I think you could phrase the question differently: What typological studies have been carried out with multiple annotators and careful documentation of the annotation process, including precise annotation guidelines, the training of the annotators, publication
of all the (individual) annotations, calculation of inter-annotator agreement etc.?<br>
<br>
I think there are very few. The reason is that the process is very time-consuming, and "risky". I was a member of a project co-directed with Vahram Atayan (Heidelberg) where we carried out very careful annotations dealing with what we call 'adverbials of immediate
posteriority' (see the references below). Even though we only dealt with a few well-known European languages, it took us quite some time to develop annotation guidelines and train annotators. The inter-rater agreement was surprisingly low even for categories
that appeared straightforward to us, e.g. agentivity of a predicate; and we were dealing with well-known languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian). So the outcomes of this process were very moderate in comparison with the work that went into the
annotations. (Note that the project was primarily situated in the field of contrastive linguistics and translation studies, not linguistic typology, but the challenges are the same).<br>
<br>
It's a dilemma: as a field, we often fail to meet even the most basic methodological requirements that are standardly made in other fields (most notably psychology). I know of at least two typological projects where inter-rater agreement tests were run, but
the results were so poor that a decision was made to not pursue this any further (meaning, the projects were continued, but without inter-annotator agreement tests; that's what makes annotation projects "risky": what do you do if you never reach a satisfactory
level of inter-annotator agreement?). Most annotation projects, including some of my own earlier work, are based on what we euphemistically call 'expert annotation', with 'expert' referring to ourselves, the authors. Today I would minimally expect the annotations
to be done by someone who is not an author, and I try to implement that requirement in my role as a journal editor (Linguistics), but it's hard. We do want to see more empirical work published, and if the methodological standards are too high, we will end
publishing nothing at all.<br>
<br>
I'd be very happy if there were community standards for this, and I'd like to hear about any iniatives implementing more rigorous methodological standards in lingusitic typology. Honestly, I wouldn't know what to require. But it seems clear to me that we cannot
simply go on like this, annotating our own data, which we subsequently analyze, as it is well known that annotation decisions are influenced by (mostly implicit) biases.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Volker<br>
<br>
Gast, Volker & Vahram Atayan (2019). 'Adverbials of immediate posteriority in French and German: A contrastive corpus study of tout de suite, immédiatement, gleich and sofort'. In Emonds, J., M. Janebová & L. Veselovská (eds.): Language Use and Linguistic Structure.
Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2018, 403-430. Olomouc Modern Lanuage Series.
</span>Olomouc: Palacký University Olomouc.<br>
<br>
in German:<br>
<br>
Atayan, V., B. Fetzer, V. Gast, D. Möller, T. Ronalter (2019). 'Ausdrucksformen der unmittelbaren Nachzeitigkeit in Originalen und Übersetzungen: Eine Pilotstudie zu den deutschen Adverbien gleich und sofort und ihren Äquivalenten im Französischen, Italienischen,
Spanischen und Englischen'. In Ahrens, B., S. Hansen-Schirra, M. Krein-Kühle, M. Schreiber, U. Wienen (eds.): Translation -- Linguistik -- Semiotik, 11-82. Berlin: Frank & Timme.<br>
<br>
Gast, V., V. Atayan, J. Biege, B. Fetzer, S. Hettrich, A. Weber (2019). 'Unmittelbare Nachzeitigkeit im Deutschen und Französischen: Eine Studie auf Grundlage des OpenSubtitles-Korpus'.
<span lang="EN-US">In Konecny, C., C. Konzett, E. Lavric, W. Pöckl (eds.): Comparatio delectat III.
</span>Akten der VIII. Internationalen Arbeitstagung zum romanisch-deutschen und innerromanischen Sprachvergleich, 223-249.
<span lang="EN-US">Frankfurt: Lang.<br>
<br>
<br>
---<br>
Prof. V. Gast<br>
</span><a href="https://linktype.iaa.uni-jena.de/VG"><span lang="EN-US">https://linktype.iaa.uni-jena.de/VG</span></a><span lang="EN-US"><br>
<br>
On Sat, 14 Oct 2023, Adam James Ross Tallman wrote:<br>
<br>
<br>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<blockquote style="margin-top:5.0pt;margin-bottom:5.0pt">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Hello all,<br>
I am gathering a list of projects / citations / papers that use or refer to inter-rater reliability. So far I have.<br>
Himmelmann et al. On the universality of intonational phrases: a cross-linguistic interrater study. Phonology 35.<br>
Gast & Koptjevskaja-Tamm. 2022. Patterns of persistence and diffusibility in the European lexicon. Linguistic Typology (not explicitly the topic of the paper, but interrater reliability metrics are used)<br>
I understand people working with Grambank have used it, but I don't know if there is a publication on that.<br>
best,<br>
Adam<br>
--<br>
Adam J.R. Tallman<br>
Post-doctoral Researcher<br>
Friedrich Schiller Universität<br>
Department of English Studies<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</blockquote>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">_______________________________________________<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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