The paper presents a tool for automatic marking up of quantifying expressions, their semantic features, and scopes. We explore the idea of using a BERT based neural model for the task (in this case HerBERT, a model trained specifically for Polish, is used). The tool is trained on a recent manually annotated Corpus of Polish Quantificational Expressions (Szymanik and Kieraś, 2022). We discuss how it performs against human annotation and present results of automatic annotation of 300 million sub-corpus of National Corpus of Polish. Our results show that language models can effectively recognise semantic category of quantification as well as identify key semantic properties of quantifiers, like monotonicity. Furthermore, the algorithm we have developed can be used for building semantically annotated quantifier corpora for other languages.

We study the role of linguistic context in predicting quantifiers (‘few’, ‘all’). We collect crowdsourced data from human participants and test various models in a local (single-sentence) and a global context (multi-sentence) condition. Models significantly out-perform humans in the former setting and are only slightly better in the latter. While human performance improves with more linguistic context (especially on proportional quantifiers), model performance suffers. Models are very effective in exploiting lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns; humans are better at genuinely understanding the meaning of the (global) context.

Among the readings available for NL sentences, those where two or more sets of entities are independent of one another are particularly challenging from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Those readings are termed here as ‘Independent Set (IS) readings'. Standard examples of such readings are the well-known Collective and Cumulative Readings. (Robaldo, 2011) proposes a logical framework that can properly represent the meaning of IS readings in terms of a set-Skolemization of the witness sets. One of the main assumptions of Robaldo's logical framework, drawn from (Schwarzschild, 1996), is that pragmatics plays a crucial role in the identification of such witness sets. Those are firstly identified on pragmatic grounds, then logical clauses are asserted on them in order to trigger the appropriate inferences. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental analysis that appears to confirm Robaldo's hypotheses concerning the pragmatic identification of the witness sets.