Towards an Integration of Syntactic and Temporal Annotations in Estonian

Abstract

We investigate the question how manually created syntactic annotations can be used to analyse and improve consistency in manually created temporal annotations. Our work introduces an annotation project for Estonian, where temporal annotations in TimeML framework were manually added to a corpus containing gold standard morphological and dependency syntactic annotations. In the first part of our work, we evaluate the consistency of manual temporal annotations, focusing on event annotations. We use syntactic annotations to distinguish different event annotation models, and we observe highest inter-annotator agreements on models representing ”prototypical events” (event verbs and events being part of the syntactic predicate of clause). In the second part of our work, we investigate how to improve consistency between syntactic and temporal annotations. We test on whether syntactic annotations can be used to validate temporal annotations: to find missing or partial annotations. Although the initial results indicate that such validation is promising, we also note that a better bridging between temporal (semantic) and syntactic annotations is needed for a complete automatic validation.

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