Abstract
This paper stems from the project A World of Possibilities. Modal pathways over an extra-long period of time: the diachrony of modality in the Latin language (WoPoss) which involves a corpus-based approach to the study of modality in the history of the Latin language. Linguistic annotation and, in particular, the semantic annotation of modality is a keystone of the project. Besides the difficulties intrinsic to any annotation task dealing with semantics, our annotation scheme involves multiple layers of annotation that are interconnected, adding complexity to the task. Considering the intricacies of our fine-grained semantic annotation, we needed to develop well-documented schemas in order to control the consistency of the annotation, but also to enable an efficient reuse of our annotated corpus. This paper presents the different elements involved in the annotation task, and how the description and the relations between the different linguistic components were formalised and documented, combining schema languages with XML documentation.
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Notes
It is worth specifying that the WoPoss team has contributed to this project by annotating some words and then discussing the annotation of modal markers. The annotation carried out in the framework of McGillivray et al. (2022) does not follow the WoPoss annotation schema.
See https://www.ucm.es/euroevidmod/ (accessed 20 June 2023).
See https://clmbr.shane.st/modal-typology/ (accessed 20 June 2023).
The relationship between modality and evidentiality is debated. A proper discussion of this point is beyond the scope of this paper.
See https://woposs.unine.ch/search (accessed 20 May 2023).
The scores were calculated using the NLTK Python library. For further details about the formula implemented see https://www.nltk.org/_modules/nltk/metrics/agreement.html.
Translation by T.R. Glover and Gerald H. Rendall (Tertullian & Minucius Felix, 1931, p. 321).
REgular LAnguage for XML Next Generation (RELAX NG) is a schema language for XML (Murata, 2014).
The element <w> is not exactly equivalent to the notion of token: for example in the case of in praesentiarum mentioned in Sect. 4.2 in relation to example 1, the adverb impraesentiarum is taken as unit of reference, thus we have one <w> element (with the corresponding @pos and @lemma attributes) with the content ‘in praesentiarum’.
For examples of linguistic annotation implemented through FS see Bański and Przepiórkowski (2009); for applications in other domains, see Bermúdez Sabel (2020) for a philological implementation, or Triplette et al. (2018) for a literary one. For a discussion of the advantages of FS see Langendoen and Simons (1995), and Stegmann and Witt (2009).
Omnem adeo mundum, si solem lunam reliqua astra desierit fontium dulcis aqua et aqua marina nutrire, in vim ignis abiturum, Stoicis constans opinio est, quod consumto umore mundus hic omnis ignescet. ‘So too the universe, if sun, moon and stars are deprived of the fountains of fresh water and the water of the seas, will disappear in a blaze of fire. The Stoics firmly maintain that when the moisture is dried out, the universe must all take fire’, translation by T.R. Glover and Gerald H. Rendall (Tertullian & Minucius Felix, 1931, p. 418).
The negation of the modal scope is annotated as an independent component only when it is not inside the scope itself, that is, when there is a negation which is semantically affecting the state of affairs, but it is not syntactically in its scope.
These results are based on the analysis of WoPoss Project (2022b), which, at the time of writing, included the following works: the epigraphic document known as the Senatus consultum (2nd c. BCE), the first book of the Metamorphoses by Ovid (1st c. BCE), Satyricon by Petronius (1st c.), De spectaculis by Tertullian (2nd c.), and Octavius by Minucius Felix (2nd c.).
See the standard 24610-1 Language Resource Management—Feature Structures—Part One: Feature Structure Representation (ISO/TC 37/SC 4, 2007).
Mixed content refers to the presence of both elements and text nodes as children of a given element.
Schematron is a language for making assertions about the presence or absence of patterns in linked XML documents (Jelliffe, 2021).
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Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF N° PP00P1 176778 and N° PP00P1 214102) and is led by Francesca Dell’Oro at the University of Neuchâtel. We wish to thank Jan Nuyts and Paola Pietrandrea for providing us support in the elaboration of our annotation model. We would like to thank the reviewers for the effort and expertise they contributed in reviewing the article.
Funding
The research leading to these results is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF N° PP00P1 176778 and N° PP00P1 214102).
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This paper was written collaboratively: H. Bermúdez Sabel is mainly responsible for Sects. 1, 4.1 (second part), 5, 6, 7 and 8; F. Dell’Oro is mainly responsible for Sects. 2 (second part), 3 and 4.1 (first part) and the general supervision; P. Marongiu is mainly responsible for Sects. 2 (first part) and 4.2.
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Bermúdez-Sabel, H., Dell’Oro, F. & Marongiu, P. Multi-layered semantic annotation and the formalisation of annotation schemas for the investigation of modality in a Latin corpus. Lang Resources & Evaluation (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-023-09706-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-023-09706-8