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LIRICS Semantic Role Annotation: Design and Evaluation of a Set of Data Categories

Semantic roles have often proved to be useful labels for stating linguistic generalisations of various sorts. There is, however, a lack of agreement on their defining criteria, which causes serious problems for semantic roles to be a useful classificatory device for predicate-argument relations. These criteria should (a) support the design of a semantic role set which is complete but does not contain redundant relations; (b) be based on semantic rather than morphological, lexical or syntactic properties; and (c) enable formal interpretation. In this paper we report on the analyses of alternative approaches to annotation and representation of semantic role information (such as FrameNet, PropBank and VerbNet) with respect to their models of description, granularity of semantic role sets, definitions of semantic roles concepts, consistency and reliability of annotations. We present methodological principles for characterising well-defined concepts which were developed within the LIRICS (Linguistic InfRastructure for Interoperable ResourCes and Systems; see http://lirics.loria.fr) project, as well as the designed set of semantic roles and their definitions in ISO 12620 format. We discuss evaluation results of the defined concepts for semantic role annotation concerning the redundancy and completeness of the tagset and the reliability of annotations in terms of inter-annotator agreement.