This paper presents Fables-DTR, a corpus of Aesop’s fables annotated for discourse and temporal relations, designed to explore how event sequencing and aspectual features and discourse relations interact. Building on the ISO 24617 Semantic Annotation Framework, integrating Part 1 (Time and Events) and Part 8 (Discourse Relations), the resource provides a unified representation of discourse structure and temporal and aspectual features. The corpus comprises 15 fables in English, automatically translated into European Portuguese and Polish (45 texts in total), with all translations manually validated by native linguists to preserve semantic and discourse features. Each fable is annotated in two layers: (i) for discourse relations, argument roles, and signals; (ii) for temporal relations, and event attributes, such as Tense, Aspect, Polarity. The resulting dataset provides relevant information about the association between discourse relations and their temporal and aspectual features. Fables-DTR contributes both a valuable resource for cross-linguistic and narrative discourse analysis and empirical evidence for integrating ISO standards in multilayer annotation. It also provides a foundation for computational applications in discourse parsing, event ordering, and implicit relation detection.

The development of a robust annotation scheme and corresponding guidelines is crucial for producing annotated datasets that advance both linguistic and computational research. This paper presents a case study that outlines a methodology for designing an annotation scheme and its guidelines, specifically aimed at representing morphosyntactic and semantic information regarding temporal features, as well as medical information in medical reports written in Portuguese. We detail a multi-step process that includes reviewing existing frameworks, conducting an annotation experiment to determine the optimal approach, and designing a model based on these findings. We validated the approach through a pilot experiment where we assessed the reliability and applicability of the annotation scheme and guidelines. In this experiment, two annotators independently annotated a patient’s medical report consisting of six documents using the proposed model, while a curator established the ground truth. The analysis of inter-annotator agreement and the annotation results enabled the identification of sources of human variation and provided insights for further refinement of the annotation scheme and guidelines.

Since the seminal work of Richard Montague in the 1970s, mathematical and logic tools have successfully been used to model several aspects of the meaning of natural language. However, visually impaired people continue to face serious difficulties in getting full access to this important instrument. Our paper aims to present a work in progress whose main goal is to provide blind students and researchers with an adequate method to deal with the different resources that are used in formal semantics. In particular, we intend to adapt the Portuguese Braille system in order to accommodate the most common symbols and formulas used in this kind of approach and to develop pedagogical procedures to facilitate its learnability. By making this formalization compatible with the Braille coding (either traditional and electronic), we hope to help blind people to learn and use this notation, essential to acquire a better understanding of a great number of semantic properties displayed by natural language.