Semantic and Pragmatic Annotation of Corpora

Workshop title: "Semantic and Pragmatic Annotation of Corpora"

Workshop date: July 16th, 2012

Location: Library: Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek (ULB), Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf

The Collaborative Research Centre CRC 991 "The Structure of Representation in Language, Cognition and Science" of the University of Düsseldorf is pleased to announce a workshop on "Semantic and Pragmatic Annotation of Corpora", to be held on July 16th, 2012, at the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf.

The workshop focuses on such procedures on the one hand and standards of semantic and pragmatic annotation of corpora on the other. The following questions and topics will be discussed: 

• How should annotation guidelines be designed to ensure that they capture what they intend to capture? Where can existing definitions of linguistic criteria be employed, and where do corpus-linguistic analyses provide insights for new or modified criteria?
• In how far can general annotation standards be applied for the investigation of semantic and pragmatic phenomena?
• How should we, in general, deal with the trade-off between the complexity of the annotation procedure and the accuracy of the results? This includes aspects such as effort, time, money, and manpower.
• How do we measure annotator agreement for complex annotation procedures? In how far does the decision to measure inter-annotator agreement influence the design of the annotation guidelines?
• How much training may an annotator receive prior to the annotation process? This aspect heavily interacts with the design and the criteria formulated in the annotation guidelines.

Concrete annotation tasks on semantic classifications, various types of anaphora, information structural categories, and coercions.

The workshop is organized by the member project C02 of the Cooperative Research Centre CRC 991 "The Structure of Representation in Language, Cognition and Science" (http://www.sfb991.uni-duesseldorf.de/), sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The project investigates shifts between noun types in corpora using statistical and semantic methods on the basis of the manual annotation of noun types.