About Certain Semantic Annotation in Parallel Corpora

• Main Author: Violetta Koseska-Toszewa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences 2015-06-01
• Series: Cognitive Studies | Études cognitives
• Subjects: direct approach to semantics; semantic annotation; perfective aspect; inperfective aspect; event; state; Petri nets; parallel corpora; contrastive linguistics
• Online Access: https://ispan.waw.pl/journals/index.php/cs-ec/article/view/775

About Certain Semantic Annotation in Parallel Corpora The semantic notation analyzed in this works is contained in the second stream of semantic theories presented here – in the direct approach semantics. We used this stream in our work on the Bulgarian-Polish Contrastive Grammar. Our semantic notation distinguishes quantificational meanings of names and predicates, and indicates aspectual and temporal meanings of verbs. It relies on logical scope-based quantification and on the contemporary theory of processes, known as “Petri nets”. Thanks to it, we can distinguish precisely between a language form and its contents, e.g. a perfective verb form has two meanings: an event or a sequence of events and states, finally ended with an event. An imperfective verb form also has two meanings: a state or a sequence of states and events, finally ended with a state. In turn, names are quantified universally or existentially when they are “undefined”, and uniquely (using the iota operator) when they are “defined”. A fact worth emphasizing is the possibility of quantifying not only names, but also the predicate, and then quantification concerns time and aspect.  This is a novum in elaborating sentence-level semantics in parallel corpora. For this reason, our semantic notation is manual. We are hoping that it will raise the interest of computer scientists working on automatic methods for processing the given natural languages. Semantic annotation defined like in this work will facilitate contrastive studies of natural languages, and this in turn will verify the results of those studies, and will certainly facilitate human and machine translations.