Double Trouble: The Problem of Construal in Semantic Annotation of Adpositions

Jena D. Hwang, Archna Bhatia, Na-Rae Han, Tim O'Gorman, Vivek Srikumar, Nathan Schneider

Abstract: We consider the semantics of preposi- tions, revisiting a broad-coverage annota- tion 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 lan- guages, as well as some problematic cases in English, have led us to reconsider the assumption that an adposition’s lexical con- tribution 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 discuss how this representation would allow for a simpler inventory of labels.