Cross-linguistic annotation of narrativity for English/French verb tense disambiguation

Cristina Grisot, Thomas Meyer

Abstract
This paper presents manual and automatic annotation experiments for a pragmatic verb tense feature (narrativity) in English/French parallel corpora. The feature is considered to play an important role for translating English Simple Past tense into French, where three different tenses are available. Whether the French Passe ́ Compose ́, Passe ́ Simple or Imparfait should be used is highly dependent on a longer-range context, in which either narrative events ordered in time or mere non-narrative state of affairs in the past are described. This longer-range context is usually not available to current machine translation (MT) systems, that are trained on parallel corpora. Annotating narrativity prior to translation is therefore likely to help current MT systems. Our experiments show that narrativity can be reliably identified with kappa-values of up to 0.91 in manual annotation and with F1 scores of up to 0.72 in automatic annotation.
Anthology ID:
L14-1346
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:
963–966
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/400_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cristina Grisot and Thomas Meyer. 2014. Cross-linguistic annotation of narrativity for English/French verb tense disambiguation. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 963–966, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Cross-linguistic annotation of narrativity for English/French verb tense disambiguation (Grisot & Meyer, LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/400_Paper.pdf
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