Metadata annotation for dramatic texts
Authors: Vincenzo Lombardo, Rossana Damiano, Antonio Pizzo (Università di Torino, 2017)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of the metadata annotation for dramatic texts. Metadata for drama describe the dramatic qualities of a text, connecting them with the linguistic expressions. Relying on an ontological representation of the dramatic qualities, the paper presents a proposal for the creation of a corpus of annotated dramatic texts.

Introduction
Drama annotation is the process of annotating the metadata of a drama. Given a drama expressed in some medium (text for screenplays, audiovisual for cinema, interactive multimedia for videogames, etc., termed by Esslin ``dramatic media'', i.e. media that display characters performing actions): the process of metadata annotation identifies what are the elements that characterize the drama and annotates such elements in some metadata format. For example, in the sentence ``Laertes and Polonius warn Ophelia to stay away from Hamlet.'', the word ``Laertes'', which refers to a drama element, namely a character, will be annotated as ``Character'', taken from some set of metadata. Drama annotation projects, with the sets of metadata and annotations proposed in the scientific literature, rely upon markup languages and semantic encoding. Recently, there have been many approaches to the annotation of stories (a larger set than drama, including general narrative, not exclusively conveyed by characters performing actions). Annotations are going to enrich drama documents with appropriate metadata. Most of the approaches, e.g., the Story Workbench tool AUTHOR and the DramaBank project AUTHOR, build upon the linguistic expression of the story, typically some natural language, and annotate story elements, such as characters and conflicts, over the linguistic layer of part-of-speech tagging and verbal frames. Other approaches are more detached from the linguistic expression: they consider the cultural object of the story and rely on conceptual models encoded in logic frameworks, e.g., the Contextus Project, visited on 7 July 2017.}, the StorySpace ontology AUTHOR. However, most projects work in an isolated fashion: each approach provides its own annotation schema, without connection with the general knowledge, and do not provide the annotated documents with a clear status. This paper presents an overview of the Drammar approach for the metadata annotation of dramatic texts: the gathering of such corpus is relevant for teaching drama through schematic charts AUTHOR, informing models of automatic storytelling AUTHOR, preserving drama as an intangible form of cultural heritage AUTHOR. We shortly review the current approaches, before introducing the Drammar ontology underlying the annotation schema. Then we describe the crowdsourcing initiative POP-ODE and the current development of the annotated corpus. Finally, we briefly discuss the status of the annotated document, before the conclusion.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have described the Drammar approach for the metadata annotation of dramatic texts. We have described the Drammar ontology and the POP-ODE initiative for the annotation pipeline for drama documents, together with the web-based annotation tool. We are going to make a vast and effective test of the annotation tool over several student classes, together with questionnaires and ethnographic observations, to evaluate the functioning of the tool and to create a vast corpus for studies in the digital humanities.