Building a reference lexicon for countability in English

Tibor Kiss, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Tobias Stadtfeld

Abstract
The present paper describes the construction of a resource to determine the lexical preference class of a large number of English noun-senses (≈ 14,000) with respect to the distinction between mass and count interpretations. In constructing the lexicon, we have employed a questionnaire-based approach based on existing resources such as the Open ANC (http://www.anc.org) and WordNet (CITATION). The questionnaire requires annotators to answer six questions about a noun-sense pair. Depending on the answers, a given noun-sense pair can be assigned to fine-grained noun classes, spanning the area between count and mass. The reference lexicon contains almost 14,000 noun-sense pairs. An initial data set of 1,000 has been annotated together by four native speakers, while the remaining 12,800 noun-sense pairs have been annotated in parallel by two annotators each. We can confirm the general feasibility of the approach by reporting satisfactory values between 0.694 and 0.755 in inter-annotator agreement using Krippendorff’s 𝛼.
Anthology ID:
L14-1312
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
995–1000
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/361_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tibor Kiss, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, and Tobias Stadtfeld. 2014. Building a reference lexicon for countability in English. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 995–1000, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Building a reference lexicon for countability in English (Kiss et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/361_Paper.pdf
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