Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies (MWE-UD 2024) @LREC-COLING-2024, pages 106–114. May 25, 2024. ©European Language Resources Association: CC BY-NC 4.0 106 Towards the semantic annotation of SR-ELEXIS corpus: Insights into Multiword Expressions and Named Entities Cvetana Krstev , Ranka Stanković , Aleksandra Marković , Teodora Mihajlov Association for Language Resources and Technologies, Univ. of Belgrade, F. of Mining and Geology, Institute for the Serbian Language SASA, Association for Language Resources and Technologies cvetana@jerteh.rs, ranka@rgf.bg.ac.rs, malexa39@gmail.com, teodoramihajlov@gmail.com Abstract This paper presents the work in progress on ELEXIS-SR corpus, the Serbian addition to the ELEXIS multilingual annotated corpus (Martelli et al., 2023), comprising semantic annotations and word sense repositories. The ELEXIS corpus has parallel annotations in ten European languages, serving as a cross-lingual benchmark for evaluating low and medium-resourced European languages. The focus in this paper is on multiword expressions (MWEs) and named entities (NEs), their recognition in the ELEXIS-SR sentence set, and comparison with annotations in other languages. The first steps in building the Serbian sense inventory are discussed, and some results concerning MWEs and NEs are analysed. Once completed, the ELEXIS-SR corpus will be the first sense annotated corpus using the Serbian WordNet (SrpWN). Finally, ideas to represent MWE lexicon entries as Linguistic Linked-Open Data (LLOD) and connect them with occurrences in the corpus are presented. Keywords: multiword expression, named entity, word sense disambiguation, sense repository, LLOD 1. Introduction Even in the current era of neural language models, there is a high demand for high-quality, openly ac- cessible corpora that are annotated with senses, especially for training and evaluating semantically related NLP tasks, like word sense disambigua- tion (WSD) and natural language understanding (NLU) (Pedersen et al., 2023b). Despite many ef- forts in the field over the past decades, such cor- pora are still scarce for many languages with lim- ited resources, including Serbian. This scarcity is caused not only by the lack of freely avail- able sense inventories, which are necessary for these tasks, but also by the complexity and cost of compiling annotations since it requires substantial manpower, preferably from experienced linguists or lexicographers. For Serbian, the availability of curated dictionaries for such use is limited, and not even subsets for particular corpora annotation are available. The paper is structured as follows: In Section 2 we give an account of related work, and con- tinue by presenting in Section 3 the ELEXIS-WSD dataset, its extension with Serbian data and its ba- sic annotation layers prior to the semantic annota- tion. Section 4 discusses the annotation of MWEs and NEs in the ELEXIS-WSD as well as in its Ser- bian extension. The building of the sense inven- tory for Serbian and the role of MWEs and NEs in it are presented in Section 5. Possible ideas for pub- lishing dictionaries of MWEs as LLOD and asso- ciating its entries with corresponding occurrences in the corpus are developed in Section 6. Finally, in Section 7 we conclude and discuss open ques- tions, potential future research, and development. 2. Related work A semantic concordance is a textual corpus and a lexicon, combined so that every substantive word in the text is linked to its appropriate sense in the lexicon (Miller et al., 1993). The popularity of SemCor (Landes et al., 1998), one of the ini- tial sense-annotated English corpora based on the Princeton WordNet sense inventory (Fellbaum, 1998) inspired the NLP community to build sense- annotated corpora for many languages. Exploiting parallel texts in the creation of multilingual semanti- cally annotated resources produced the MultiSem- Cor Corpus (Bentivogli and Pianta, 2005