Semantics of noun/verb conversion in Czech: Lessons learned from corpus data annotation

Anna Staňková, Magda Ševčíková, Hana Hledíková, Lukáš Kyjánek

Abstract:

The paper contributes to the study of conversion in Czech, which in the literature on
Czech is rarely understood as an independent word-formation process and therefore
not much attention has been paid to its semantics (only as part of research on
derivation). An annotation experiment is presented in which semantic relations in 800
conversion pairs are assessed on the basis of corpus concordances by two human raters
in parallel. The annotation experiment provides evidence of the applicability of
semantic classification of conversion based on meaning paraphrases on large-scale
linguistic data, showing that it is possible to reach reasonable inter-annotator
agreement. The sources of disagreement, as well as the patterns of polysemy found in
the data, provide information about the conceptual relationships between the semantic
categories in conversion.