Annotating natural language sentences with quantifier scoping has proved to be very hard. In order to overcome the challenge, previous work on building scope-annotated corpora has focused on sentences with two explicitly quantified noun phrases (NPs). Furthermore, it does not address the annotation of scopal operators or complex NPs such as plurals and definites. We present the first annotation scheme for quantifier scope disambiguation where there is no restriction on the type or the number of scope-bearing elements in the sentence. We discuss some of the most prominent complex scope phenomena encountered in annotating the corpus, such as plurality and type-token distinction, and present mechanisms to handle those phenomena.

We describe a new multimodal corpus currently under development. The corpus consists of videos of task-oriented dialogues that are annotated for speaker’s verbal requests and domain action executions. This resource provides data for new research on language production and comprehension. The corpus can be used to study speakers’ decisions as to how to structure their utterances given the complexity of the message they are trying to convey.