We present a scheme for annotating causal language in various genres of text. Our annotation scheme is built on the popular categories of cause, enable, and prevent. These vague categories have many edge cases in natural language, and as such can prove difficult for annotators to consistently identify in practice. We introduce a decision based annotation method for handling these edge cases. We demonstrate that, by utilizing this method, annotators are able to achieve inter-annotator agreement which is comparable to that of previous studies. Furthermore, our method performs equally well across genres, highlighting the robustness of our annotation scheme. Finally, we observe notable variation in usage and frequency of causal language across different genres.

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a semantic graph framework which inadequately represent a number of important semantic features including number, (in)definiteness, quantifiers, and intensional contexts. Several proposals have been made to improve the representational adequacy of AMR by enriching its graph structure. However, these modifications are rarely added to existing AMR corpora due to the labor costs associated with manual annotation. In this paper, we develop an automated annotation tool which algorithmically enriches AMR graphs to better represent number, (in)definite articles, quantificational determiners, and intensional arguments. We compare our automatically produced annotations to gold-standard manual annotations and show that our automatic annotator achieves impressive results. All code for this paper, including our automatic annotation tool, is made publicly available.

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a graphical meaning representation language designed to represent propositional information about argument structure. However, at present it is unable to satisfyingly represent non-veridical intensional contexts, often licensing inappropriate inferences. In this paper, we show how to resolve the problem of non-veridicality without appealing to layered graphs through a mapping from AMRs into Simply-Typed Lambda Calculus (STLC). At least for some cases, this requires the introduction of a new role :content which functions as an intensional operator. The translation proposed is inspired by the formal linguistics literature on the event semantics of attitude reports. Next, we address the interaction of quantifier scope and intensional operators in so-called de re/de dicto ambiguities. We adopt a scope node from the literature and provide an explicit multidimensional semantics utilizing Cooper storage which allows us to derive the de re and de dicto scope readings as well as intermediate scope readings which prove difficult for accounts without a scope node.