Corpora: Collaborative effort

[E S Atwell]

>I agreed if the sense tags have completely different meaning. However,
>the differences in meaning between tags may be in shades of meaning
>rather than the crisp decision that they are or not same.
Surely this is the underlying flaw in the concept of "semantic tagging".
My background is in PoS-tagging, where there are several rival tagsets and
tagging schemes, but nevertheless there is general consensus on PoS
categories (eg noun, verb) and subcats/features (eg singular n/v,
superlative adj) despite having different labels and grey areas in
boundaries.  In contrast, I don't believe there is a clear, "self-evident"
set of semantic tags. Semantic tagging could instead aim to annotate each
word with a SET of semantic features, and "disambiguation" could aim to
eliminate sematic features incompatible with context; this would allow for
overlap and indeterminate sense-tagging. The set of semantic features for
a word could be a bundle of semantic information, for example the
lemma/root, subject-category code, selection restrictions, and meaning
definition from LDOCE; instead of sense-tagging, if the aim was to
eliminate features which were incompatible with context, you should get
more inter-annotator agreement.

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Eric Atwell, Distributed Multimedia Systems MSc Tutor & SOCRATES Tutor
Centre for Computer Analysis of Language And Speech (CCALAS)
School of Computer Studies, University of Leeds, LEEDS LS2 9JT
TEL: (44)113-2335430  FAX: (44)113-2335468
WWW: http://www.scs.leeds.ac.uk/eric  EMAIL: eric at scs.leeds.ac.uk