The ISO working group on semantic annotation aims to adopt the UMR formalism to represent dynamic information involving motions and their embedding grounds. The paper details how ISO’s XML-based temporal and spatial annotations, involving motions and spatio-temporally conditioned event-paths, will be converted to AMR or UMR forms. It also attempts to enrich the representation of dynamic information with the integrated spatio-temporal annotation scheme that accommodates first-order dynamic logic, as briefly noted. The main motivation of such an effort is to make spatio-temporal annotations and related dynamic information easily understandable by artificial agents like robots to act. Our approach bridges ISO’s richly specified standards with the task-oriented expressiveness of UMR and dynamic logic. This integration paves the way for seamless downstream use of spatio-temporal annotations in dialogue systems, simulation environments, and embodied agents.

This paper describes some of the ongoing work within the ISO preliminary work item PWI 254617-17, ‘Interlinking of annotations’. This PWI investigates the possibilities and problems of combining annotations made with different annotation schemes. using the ‘interlinking’ approach (Bunt, 2024) applied to different parts of the multi-part standard ISO 24617, ‘Semantic annotation framework’. This paper focuses on the combination of ISO-TimeML and QuantML at the level of abstract syntax. A new version is defined for the ISO-TimeML abstract syntax specification and how it relates to the concrete (XML-based) syntax as a basis for this combination. As a side-effect, some issues in the use of ISO-TimeML come to light that could be relevant for a possible future second edition of this standard.

This paper explores the possibilities and the problems in using Unified Meaning Representations (UMRs) for representing annotations of quantification phenomena, according to the ISO standard scheme QuantML (ISO 24617-12:2025). We show that the semantic information in QuantML annotations can we expressed in UMR, provided that some powerful semantic concepts are introduced and a slightly more general approach is adopted for the representation of multiple scope relations. Conversion functions are defined that transform the XML-based representations of QuantML into UMR structures and vice versa. The consequences are discussed that can be drawn from this regarding the possible role of UMR and the semantics of UMR representations of quantification.

As precursor work in preparation for an international standard ISO/PWI 24617-16 Language resource management – Semantic annotation – Part 16: Evaluative language, we aim to test and enhance the reliability of the annotation of subjective evaluation based on Appraisal Theory. We describe a comprehensive three-phase workflow tested on COVID-19 media reports to achieve reliable agreement through progressive training and quality control. Our methodology addresses some of the key challenges through the refinement of targeted guideline refinements and the development of interactive clarification tools, alongside a custom platform that enables the pre-classification of six evaluative categories, systematic annotation review, and organized documentation. We report empirical results that demonstrate substantial improvements from the initial moderate agreement to a strong final consensus. Our research offers both theoretical refinements addressing persistent classification challenges in evaluation and practical solutions for the implementation of the annotation workflow, proposing a replicable methodology for the achievement of reliable annotation consistency in the annotation of evaluative language.

This paper aims at enriching Annotation-Based Semantics (ABS) with the notion of small visual worlds, called the Vox worlds, to interpret dialogues in natural language. It attempts to implement classical set-theoretic models with these Vox worlds that serve as interpretation models. These worlds describe dialogue situations while providing background for the visualization of those situations in which these described dialogues take place interactively among dialogue participants, often triggering actions and emotions. The enriched ABS is based on VoxML, a modeling language for visual object conceptual structures (vocs or vox) that constitute the structural basis of visual worlds.

VoxML is a modeling language used to map natural language expressions into real time visualizations using real-world semantic knowledge of objects and events. Its utility has been demonstrated in embodied simulation environmens and in agent-object interactions in situated human-agent communicative. It is enriched to work with notions of affordances, both Gibsonian and Telic, and habitat for various interactions between the rational agent (human) and an object. This paper aims to specify VoxML as an annotation language in general abstract terms. It then shows how it works on annotating linguistic data that express visually perceptible human-object interactions. The annotation structures thus generated will be interpreted against the enriched minimal model created by VoxML as a modeling language while supporting the modeling purposes of VoxML linguistically.

This paper proposes a semantics ABS for the model-theoretic interpretation of annotation structures. It provides a language ABSr, that represents semantic forms in a (possibly 𝜆-free) type-theoretic first-order logic. For semantic compositionality, the representation language introduces two operators ⊕ and ⊘ with subtypes for the conjunctive or distributive composition of semantic forms. ABS also introduces a small set of logical predicates to represent semantic forms in a simplified format. The use of ABSr is illustrated with some annotation structures that conform to ISO 24617 standards on semantic annotation such as ISO-TimeML and ISO-Space.

In this paper, we present ISO-TimeML, a revised and interoperable version of the temporal markup language, TimeML. We describe the changes and enrichments made, while framing the effort in a more general methodology of semantic annotation. In particular, we assume a principled distinction between the annotation of an expression and the representation which that annotation denotes. This involves not only the specification of an annotation language for a particular phenomenon, but also the development of a meta-model that allows one to interpret the syntactic expressions of the specification semantically.

This paper describes an ISO project which aims at developing a standard for annotating spoken and multimodal dialogue with semantic information concerning the communicative functions of utterances, the kind of semantic content they address, and their relations with what was said and done earlier in the dialogue. The project, ISO 24617-2 ""Semantic annotation framework, Part 2: Dialogue acts"", is currently at DIS stage. The proposed annotation schema distinguishes 9 orthogonal dimensions, allowing each functional segment in dialogue to have a function in each of these dimensions, thus accounting for the multifunctionality that utterances in dialogue often have. A number of core communicative functions is defined in the form of ISO data categories, available at http://semantic-annotation.uvt.nl/dialogue-acts/iso-datcats.pdf; they are divided into ""dimension-specific"" functions, which can be used only in a particular dimension, such as Turn Accept in the Turn Management dimension, and ""general-purpose"" functions, which can be used in any dimension, such as Inform and Request. An XML-based annotation language, ""DiAML"" is defined, with an abstract syntax, a semantics, and a concrete syntax.