Annotating Quantified Phenomena in Complex Sentence Structures Using the Example of Generalising Statements in Literary Texts (2021)

Abstract: We present a tagset for the annotation of quantification which we currently use to annotate certain quantified statements in fictional works of literature. Literary texts feature a rich variety in expressing quantification, including a broad range of lexemes to express quantifiers and complex sentence structures to express the restrictor and the nuclear scope of a quantification. Our tagset consists of seven tags and covers all types of quantification that occur in natural language, including vague quantification and generic quantification. In the second part of the paper, we introduce our German corpus with annotations of generalising statements, which form a proper subset of quantified statements.

## introduction quantification is a core element of human language because it allows us to make statements about groups or classes of entities, in contrast to statements about individually referenced entities. one subtype of quantified statements are generalising or generic (for now summarised as generalising) statements that involve quantification over assumed members of a class rather than contextually given entities. these generalising statements are particularly interesting for nlp applications that operate on discourse-level, e.g. in knowledge extraction (e.g. @xcite and argumentation mining (e.g. @xcite . but also in computational literary studies, generalising statements can be viewed as indicators (i.e. features) for meta-level phenomena such as passages of (self-)reflection (cf. @xcite or passages addressing real-world issues within a fictional text (e.g. @xcite . put very concisely, one traditionally differentiates between (determiner or generic) quantification on np-level and (adverbial or generic) quantification on clause-level @xcite @xcite , which is also reflected in certain annotation schemes (cf. @xcite . however, for such higher-level applications, where the presence of quantification or, more specifically, generalisation serves as a feature, the syntactic or semantic structure of quantified statements plays only a subordinate role. therefore, performing a syntactic and/or semantic analysis during the annotation would be laborious but not expedient-especially in domains where sentences tend to employ a complex syntactic structure, such as literary texts. moreover, quantified statements are not always marked by an overt linguistic marker but can also be covertly quantified in the case of generic statements. for generalisation specifically, previous work commonly differentiates between generalisation over (kinds of) individuals and generalisation over recurring events/situations @xcite @xcite . similar to the syntactic categorisation, this is not only an insufficient differentiation if one is interested in generalising statements as a whole; it further constitutes a limitation, since it is possible to quantify (and thus generalise) over other types of entities than the two just mentioned. we shall expand on the theoretical syntactic and semantic considerations in section 2 and give an overview of related practical challenges in literary texts in section 3. considering both the theoretical and practical aspects, we developed a tagset and annotation guidelines for generalising statements that are neither bound to syntactic nor to semantic properties and preserve only the information which is most important in our view: the type of quantification (universal/existential/vague etc.). this shallow annotation scheme allows a comparatively fast annotation of generalising statements, which is especially valu- ## quantification in english (and in german), quantificational notions are typically triggered by determiners, e.g. all, most etc., or adverbs, e.g. always, usually etc. following @xcite , @xcite and @xcite , we assume quantified statements to consist of a tripartite logical form consisting of the quantifier q, the restrictor and the nuclear scope: we subsume determiners and adverbs to both function as quantifiers in this model: ## challenges in literary texts we are interested in the distribution of such structures as "general statements" or "statements of universal validity" in german fictional texts. therefore, we are aiming at annotating quantified statements in any form they may occur in. our corpus consists of fictional texts written or published between 1650 and 1950. hence, we are not only confronted with complex sentence structures, which are typical for literary texts, but also with older versions of german. we need an annotation concept that lets us capture quantified expressions in all their variety. although our research does not primarily focus on the surface quantification, but on the generalising function that these structures fulfil, our work has a solid foundation in (formal) linguistics, as we will show in section 4. therefore, the transfer of theoretical knowledge about quantification into computational linguistics turns out to be a challenge-especially for analysing the literary domain. particularly, we are facing three main challenges: first, the default formal analysis of quantification by defining quantifier, restrictor, and scope (as established in the previous section) can be highly complex in sentences of fictional writing. on top of that, german allows comparatively long and complex multi-clause sentences, especially in older language variants. this issue is illustrated in (7), where we already cut out several embedded if-clauses (german: wenn 'if') out of this one sentence. the english translation in (7') does not take the various if-clauses on and splits them up into separate sentences: (7) wenn luciane, meine tochter, die für die welt geboren ist, sich dort für die welt bildet, [...]; wenn sie durch freiheit des betragens, anmut im tanze, schickliche bequemlichkeit des gesprächs sich vor allen auszeichnet und durch ein angebornes herrschendes wesen sich zur königin des kleinen kreises macht, wenn die vorsteherin dieser anstalt sie als kleine gottheit ansieht, die nun erst unter ihren händen recht gedeiht, die ihr ehre machen, zutrauen erwerben und einen zufluß von andern jungen personen verschaffen wird, wenn [...]: so ist dagegen, was sie schließlich von ottilien erwähnt, nur immer entschuldigung auf entschuldigung [...]. (goethe, wv) (7') luciana, my daughter, born as she is for the world, is there training hourly for the world [...] she distinguishes herself above every one at the school with the freedom of her carriage, the grace of her movement, and the elegance of her address, and with the inborn royalty of nature makes herself the queen of the little circle there. the superior of the establishment regards her as a little divinity, who, under her hands, is shaping into excellence, and who will do her honor, gain her reputation, and bring her a large increase of pupils; [...] while her concluding sentences about ottilie are nothing but excuse after excuse. (goethe, ea, p. 23 f.) if-clauses, as in (7) can be considered as restrictors (compare for ease of presentation, we shall only use english examples in the following, taken from official translations. the original examples are provided in the appendix (b). second, we have to deal with ambivalent syntactic structures, leading to scope ambiguity. if a sentence carries more than one quantifier, different readings arise due to the dominant quantification. for quantification is a greater problem than an overpresence. the generic nps (cf. @xcite , e.g. business and life in (9), certainly have a generalising function in this context, but are not overtly quantified. in the following section, we will present our annotation tagset, which allows us to tackle these issues. ## a tagset for quantified statements the complete tagset is summarised in we use brackets to indicate annotation spans and subscripts to denote tags. the following subsections motivate the individual tags. ## corpus and annotations we currently construct a diachronic corpus of german fictional literature from 1650 to 1950. as of now, we annotated generalising interpretations in ten texts-excluding some additional texts from a pilot annotation for developing our annotation guidelines. catma 7 appeared to be most suitable for annotating fictional texts and became our tool of choice. in order to create a versatile dataset and save resources, we annotate only the beginning of every text (usually the first about 200 sentences). our annotation procedure is as follows: each text is first annotated by two out of six student assistants. in a second step, two researchers glance over the text again, focusing on the statements that were annotated by at least one annotator, discuss the annotations and create an expert annotation as gold standard. arguably, this procedure is prone to false negatives, i.e. statements that none of the annotators identified are likely to be missed while creating the gold standard. we measure inter-annotator agreement on tokenlevel (excluding punctuation) using κ @xcite , treating the occurring tag combinations as 6 generic is not the same as generalising by our definition: since generic quantification can also be used to express definitional statements (e.g. triangles have three sides), not all generic statements are generalising statements. ## related work while the data in the existing corpora that are annotated with phenomena related to generalisation usually originates from the domains traditional for nlp, such as news and internet communication, we investigate generalisation in fiction, a more complex domain. to the best of our knowledge, there are no corpora on generalisation or genericity for german and our work reduces this gap. most existing resources focus on noun phrases, often in the context of coreference resolution. a detailed survey on generics in the coreference resolution research can be found in @xcite . @xcite provide a survey of genericity-annotated corpora for english. they note that ace corpora @xcite are most widely used, e.g. by @xcite , to identify generic noun phrases using a supervised approach. @xcite were the first to suggest an annotation scheme for generic statements where both clauses and their subject nps are annotated with the labels "generic" and "non-generic". however, they only consider kind-referring generics and exclude e.g. habitual statements. in a subsequent work, @xcite investigate both habituals and kind-referring generics as two separate situation entity types, alongside with states and events, in a sentence classification task. many of the existing works use a limited set of labels: generic/non-generic or generic/specific. herbelot and copestake @xcite use a tagset similar to ours: one, some, most, all, quant. however, their concept is quite different: the authors assume that covertly quantified nps are not generic but underspecified and label those nps according to how many members of a class they refer to. bhakthavatsalam et al. (2020) create a large knowledge base of generic statements. the metadata in this knowledge base includes the term (restrictor) and the quantifier. they also include statements with an overt quantifier but "generic interpretation". contrasting the previously mentioned shallow annotation schemes, @xcite propose an annotation scheme for quantifi-cation that consists of several layers for syntactic and semantic representations but does not incorporate solutions for generics/habituals, yet. @xcite suggest to expand the existing abstract meaning representation (amr) framework for the semantic annotation of sentences @xcite by marking aspect and tense. as for aspect, they include such categories as "habitual" that characterise a regular recurrence of an event or state, and "stable" that characterises states and includes generalisations over kinds. in comparison to the discussed approaches, we do not limit ourselves to nps or clauses but annotate entire statements. our tagset provides tags for overt quantification as well as covert generic quantification. regarding the annotation of generalising statements, we jointly consider generalisations about entities, events and other types, that have been predominantly studied separately in the past. ## conclusion and future work in this paper, we presented an annotation scheme for quantified phenomena using the example of generalisation. our tagset matches every quantifier occurring in natural language to a particular tag, based on semantic criteria. we propose a shallow annotation that combines quantifier, restrictor and nuclear scope into a common annotation span, where the smallest unit of annotation is a clause. this approach is suitable for large-scale annotations which aim to investigate the distribution of quantified phenomena in a corpus, or to mark quantified statements to serve as feature input in followup applications. as a first step in this direction, we introduce our corpus of fictional texts that are annotated with generalising interpretations (among other phenomena). 8 moreover, we are working on an automatic tagger for generalising statements.