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<Paper uid="W04-2327">
  <Title>The MATE/GNOME Proposals for Anaphoric Annotation, Revisited</Title>
  <Section position="5" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Discussion
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    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
4.1 Aspects of the MATE proposals that have been
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      <Paragraph position="0"> proven useful Our experience with multi-level annotation in GNOME suggests that standoff is clearly the way to go, allowing multiple annotators to work on the same files, and separating logically independent tasks, but appropriate tools are required. The annotation tools we have discussed, such as MMAX, are therefore useful even though they do 8The version of MMAX currently being developed will allow for multiple markables.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> not implement all aspects of the MATE. Knitting back is also possible with the Discourse API.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> Our experience with VENEX suggests that two of the most beneficial aspects of having a separate &lt;link&gt; element are ones that we had not originally considered: that they can be used to mark general semantic relations, not just anaphoric relations (for more complex types of semantic annotation); and that they make it harder for annotators to forget to fill in aspects of the annotation. Unfortunately, at the moment there is no tool that can be used to create this type of annotation directly.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
4.2 Aspects already reconsidered
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      <Paragraph position="0"> Predicative NPs During the GNOME and VENEX annotations we realized that the recommendation not to mark predicative NPs makes it impossible to do markable identification automatically. In addition, it's often difficult to decide whether an NP is used predicatively or referentially, especially in languages like Italian where subjects in such clauses are often used predicatively (as in La soluzione e' questa). In GNOME, a new attribute LF TYPE was introduced to specify the type of semantic object denoted by an NP: term, quant and pred.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> The annotators were instructed to concentrate on term-denoting NPs. The instructions for classifying NPs according to their semantic type were based mostly on syntactic information, but the annotation was reliable. In the instructions for the VENEX annotation, the instructions for recognizing term-denoting NP are further developed.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> Restricting the range of associative relations The range of associative relations tested in GNOME is much narrower than those considered in DRAMA, but they can be annotated reliably, at least in the sense that very few disagreements are observed. Extending the range of relations to include, for example, attributes (e.g, I am not going to buy that. The price is too high. or situational associations (John entered a restaurant. The waiter approached him immediately) has proven difficult.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> Units and Utterances The study of Centering carried in GNOME indicated quite clearly that annotation of &lt;unit&gt; elements is essential for the study of anaphora.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
4.3 Further Revisions
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      <Paragraph position="0"> One aspect of the markup scheme that needs revision is the placement of the semantic relation. One problem we observed in GNOME is that often the ambiguity is not simply between two possible antecedents each of which stands in the same relation to the anaphoric expression, but between two antecedents which stand in different relations. In the pharmaceutical texts, for example, it is often unclear whether a particular mention of the medicine under consideration refers to the generic product, or to the particular instance that the user has in their hands. In this case, we would want annotators to mark the anaphoric expression as IDENT with one object, and ELEMENT of the other (ELEMENT is also used in GNOME for relations between instances and types), as follows, but this is not possible in either the original MATE scheme or in the GNOME</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
4.4 Open Issues
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      <Paragraph position="0"> Ambiguity Offering annotators the opportunity to annotate anaphoric ambiguity is essential, especially for annotations used to study linguistic phenomena, but raises serious theoretical and practical problems. A coreference chain containing such links becomes a coreference (directed) graph, in which each of the paths across the graph is a potential interpretation. While having multiple paths is not a problem as far as evaluating the results of an anaphoric resolver (any path in the graph counts as a valid solution), it is a serious problems both for scripts attempting to ensure consistency (e.g., that all references to the same object are marked as either generic or non-genericthis is of course impossible when one of the possible antecedents is generic while the other isn't) as well for annotation tools (the problem is of course worsened when the tool only uses a single attribute to indicate membership in a coreference chain).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Revision A second difficult problem is caused by cases, common in the MapTask dialogues, in which after a while a participant realizes that their previous belief that an object was identical to another object is mistaken. In these cases, the participant is arguably revising their previous beliefs; it is not clear then what should be done with the annotation of the original anaphoric information.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
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