Towards Consistent UMR Annotation of Deverbal Nouns: Evidence from Czech and Latin

Abstract

Deverbal nouns pose challenges for semantic annotation frameworks that aim to represent event structures consistently across lexical categories. This paper examines problematic phenomena in the annotation of deverbal nouns in Czech and Latin within the Universal Meaning Representation (UMR) framework, addressing both manual graph construction and rule-based automatic conversion from existing resources. Current UMR guidelines lack operational criteria for deciding when a noun should be treated as an eventive concept, particularly in the absence of a PropBank-like lexicon with sufficient nominal coverage. We therefore propose practical annotation principles: deverbal nouns denoting events (such as učení ‘teaching’), results of events (řešení ‘solution’), or event participants (učitel ‘teacher’) should be related to underlying event concepts (represented as verbs in their particular senses, i.e., učit-001 ‘to teach’, vyřešit-001 ‘to solve’, and učit-001 ‘to teach’, respectively), while other deverbal nouns should remain unrelated to respective events (such as učebna ‘teaching room’). To reduce inter-annotator variation, we further suggest systematic strategies for selecting verbal labels, including the use of light-verb constructions, synonymous verbs, and a preference for imperfective verbs in Czech aspectual pairs. For automatic conversion, we outline a rule-based approach that combines multiple lexical resources and frequency-based heuristics to identify corresponding verb senses. Our findings provide guidelines for more consistent UMR annotation across languages.

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