@inproceedings{schmuck-etal-2026-cross,
    title = "Cross-Linguistic Situation Entity Segmentation for Discourse Analysis in Diachronic {E}nglish and {G}erman Text",
    author = {Schm{\"u}ck, Hanna  and
      Urban, Veronika  and
      Kr{\"u}ckl, Xaver  and
      Zeman, Sonja  and
      Claridge, Claudia  and
      Friedrich, Annemarie},
    editor = "Liu, Yang Janet  and
      Gessler, Luke",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 20th Linguistic Annotation Workshop ({LAW} {XX})",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.law-main.8/",
    pages = "95--112",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-404-0",
    abstract = "Situation Entity (SE) segmentation identifies clause-like discourse units focusing on verb constellations. While SE segmentation has been applied to contemporary English as a subtask of SE annotation, systematic guidelines for syntactically ambiguous constructions remain underspecified. We present principled SE segmentation guidelines for contemporary and historical varieties of English and German. Our inter-annotator agreement studies on Late Modern English (1700{--}1900) and New High German (1650{--}1900) corpora demonstrate substantial agreement. Using the existing SitEnt corpus in contemporary English, we implement a new automatic segmenter based on XLM-RoBERTa. Our evaluation examines cross-variety and cross-lingual generalization, demonstrating challenges both for human annotation efforts and in transferring segmenters trained on contemporary English to historical varieties. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/coling-unia/sitent-segmenter-law2026."
}