We present the first experiment-based study that explicitly contrasts the three major semantic role labeling frameworks. As a prerequisite, we create a dataset labeled with parallel FrameNet-, PropBank-, and VerbNet-style labels for German. We train a state-of-the-art SRL tool for German for the different annotation styles and provide a comparative analysis across frameworks. We further explore the behavior of the frameworks with automatic training data generation. VerbNet provides larger semantic expressivity than PropBank, and we find that its generalization capacity approaches PropBank in SRL training, but it benefits less from training data expansion than the sparse-data affected FrameNet.

We present a VerbNet-based annotation scheme for semantic roles that we explore in an annotation study on German language data that combines word sense and semantic role annotation. We reannotate a substantial portion of the SALSA corpus with GermaNet senses and a revised scheme of VerbNet roles. We provide a detailed evaluation of the interaction between sense and role annotation. The resulting corpus will allow us to compare VerbNet role annotation for German to FrameNet and PropBank annotation by mapping to existing role annotations on the SALSA corpus. We publish the annotated corpus and detailed guidelines for the new role annotation scheme.

We introduce the third major release of WebAnno, a generic web-based annotation tool for distributed teams. New features in this release focus on semantic annotation tasks (e.g. semantic role labelling or event annotation) and allow the tight integration of semantic annotations with syntactic annotations. In particular, we introduce the concept of slot features, a novel constraint mechanism that allows modelling the interaction between semantic and syntactic annotations, as well as a new annotation user interface. The new features were developed and used in an annotation project for semantic roles on German texts. The paper briefly introduces this project and reports on experiences performing annotations with the new tool. On a comparative evaluation, our tool reaches significant speedups over WebAnno 2 for a semantic annotation task.