The MATE/GNOME Proposals for Anaphoric Annotation, Revisited
Summary
Poesio revisits the MATE "meta-scheme" for anaphoric annotation, proposed about five years earlier in the MATE project on dialogue annotation tools. The scheme assumes that no single set of annotator instructions can cover every kind of anaphora or application. It argues instead that one general XML markup can implement many specific schemes, including MUCCS, DRAMA and MapTask landmark references. That markup is standoff, with separate de markables and link elements holding one or more anchor antecedents.
The paper reviews experience from projects built on the scheme, namely the GNOME corpus and the VENEX corpus of Italian speech and text, and from tools such as MMAX and the ILSP Annotator. Standoff storage and separate link elements proved valuable. Some parts needed rethinking, such as how to handle predicative NPs and how many associative relations to allow. Unresolved issues include ambiguity across different relation types and belief revision in dialogue. The study offers practical guidance for building reusable anaphora and coreference resources.
Key points
- The MATE markup separates markables (
de) from relations (linkwithanchor). This allows several relations per expression, ambiguous antecedents, and a WHO-BELIEVES attribute for MapTask misunderstandings. - The GNOME corpus served for Centering and salience studies, for statistical NL generation models, and for evaluating anaphora resolution, especially bridging references. VENEX extends the approach to Italian dialogue and text.
- GNOME added an LF TYPE attribute with the values term, quant and pred. Annotators focus on term-denoting NPs, and this classification was annotated reliably.
- A narrow set of associative relations was annotated with few disagreements. Adding attribute relations or situational associations (e.g., restaurant → waiter) proved difficult.
- The author proposes moving the relation type onto each anchor, so that one expression can be IDENT to one antecedent and ELEMENT of another. Belief revision in MapTask dialogues remains an open problem.
Cited by
- Phrase Detectives Corpus 1.0 Crowdsourced Anaphoric Coreference.
- Experiments on bridging across languages and genres
- Unrestricted Bridging Resolution
- Bridging Anaphora Resolution as Question Answering
- PoCoS - Potsdam Coreference Scheme
- Collective Classification for Fine-grained Information Status
- Coreference meets Universal Dependencies – a pilot experiment on harmonizing coreference datasets for 11 languages
- The Reliability of Anaphoric Annotation, Reconsidered: Taking Ambiguity into Account
- Anaphora Resolution with the ARRAU Corpus
- Introducing the Prague Discourse Treebank 1.0
- CoNLL-2011 Shared Task: Modeling Unrestricted Coreference in OntoNotes
- CoNLL-2012 Shared Task: Modeling Multilingual Unrestricted Coreference in OntoNotes
- Annotating Near-Identity from Coreference Disagreements
Cite
@inproceedings{poesio2004mate,
title = {{The MATE/GNOME Proposals for Anaphoric Annotation, Revisited}},
author = {Poesio, Massimo},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 5th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue at HLT-NAACL 2004},
year = {2004},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/W04-2327/}
}References
- F. Bruneseaux and L. Romary. 1998. Documents préparatoires pour le codage de dialogues multi-modaux suivant les directives de la TEI. Available at http://www.loria.fr/˜romary/Documents/index.html. ↗
- L. Burnard and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. 2002. TEI lite: An introduction to text encoding for interchange. http://www.tei-c.org/Lite. ↗
- H. Cheng, M. Poesio, R. Henschel, and C. Mellish. 2001. Corpus-based NP modifier generation. In Proc. of the Second NAACL, Pittsburgh. find
- Hua Cheng. 2001. Modelling Aggregation Motivated Interactions in Descriptive Text Generation. Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh. find
- B. J. Grosz, A. K. Joshi, and S. Weinstein. 1995. Centering: A framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 21(2):202–225. find our card
- J. K. Gundel, N. Hedberg, and R. Zacharski. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 69(2):274–307. find
- J. A. Hawkins. 1978. Definiteness and Indefiniteness. Croom Helm, London. find
- I. Heim. 1982. The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. find
- R. Henschel, H. Cheng, and M. Poesio. 2000. Pronominalization revisited. In Proc. of 18th COLING, Saar-bruecken, August. find
- L. Hirschman. 1998. MUC-7 coreference task definition, version 3.0. In N. Chinchor, editor, In Proc. of the 7th Message Understanding Conference. find our card
- H. Kamp and U. Reyle. 1993. From Discourse to Logic. D. Reidel, Dordrecht. find
- N. Karamanis. 2003. Entity coherence for descriptive text structuring. Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh. find
- R. Kibble and R. Power. 2000. An integrated framework for text planning and pronominalization. In Proc. of the International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG), Israel, June. find
- D. Marcu. 1999. Instructions for manually annotating the discourse structures of texts. Unpublished manuscript, USC/ISI, May. find
- D. McKelvie, A. Isard, A. Mengel, M. B. Moeller, M. Grosse, and M. Klein. 2001. The MATE workbench - an annotation tool for XML corpora. Speech Communication, 33(1-2):97–112. find
- C. Müller and M. Strube. 2003. Multi-level annotation in MMAX. In Proc. of the 4th SIGDIAL, pages 198–207. find
- R. Passonneau. 1997. Instructions for applying discourse reference annotation for multiple applications (DRAMA). Unpublished manuscript., December. find
- J. Pearson, R. Stevenson, and M. Poesio. 2000. Pronoun resolution in complex sentences. In Proc. of AMLAP, Leiden. find
- M. Poesio and M. Alexandrov-Kabadjov. 2004. A general-purpose, off the shelf anaphoric resolver. In Proc. of LREC, Lisbon, May. find
- M. Poesio and B. Di Eugenio. 2001. Discourse structure and anaphoric accessibility. In Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová and Mark Steedman, editors, Proc. of the ESSLLI 2001 Workshop on Information Structure, Discourse Structure and Discourse Semantics. find
- M. Poesio and M. Nissim. 2001. Salience and possessive NPs: the effect of animacy and pronominalization. In Proc. of AMLAP (Poster Session). find
- M. Poesio and N. Nygren-Modjeska. To appear. Focus, activation, and this-noun phrases: An empirical investigation. In A. Branco, R. McEnery, and R. Mitkov, editors, Anaphora Processing. John Benjamins. find
- M. Poesio and R. Vieira. 1998. A corpus-based investigation of definite description use. Computational Linguistics, 24(2):183–216, June. find
- M. Poesio, F. Bruneseaux, and L. Romary. 1999. The MATE meta-scheme for coreference in dialogues in multiple languages. In M. Walker, editor, Proc. of the ACL Workshop on Standards and Tools for Discourse Tagging, pages 65–74. find our card
- M. Poesio, H. Cheng, R. Henschel, J. M. Hitzeman, R. Kibble, and R. Stevenson. 2000. Specifying the parameters of Centering Theory: a corpus-based evaluation using text from application-oriented domains. In Proc. of the 38th ACL, Hong Kong, October. find
- M. Poesio, R. Delmonte, A. Bristot, L. Chiran, and S. Tonelli. 2004a. The VENEX corpus of anaphoric information in spoken and written Italian. Submitted. find
- M. Poesio, R. Mehta, A. Maroudas, and J. Hitzeman. 2004b. Learning to solve bridging references. Submitted. find
- M. Poesio, R. Stevenson, B. Di Eugenio, and J. M. Hitzeman. 2004c. Centering: A parametric theory and its instantiations. Computational Linguistics. To appear. find
- M. Poesio. 2000a. Annotating a corpus to develop and evaluate discourse entity realization algorithms: issues and preliminary results. In Proc. of the 2nd LREC, pages 211–218, Athens, May. find
- M. Poesio, 2000b. The GNOME Annotation Scheme Manual. University of Edinburgh, HCRC and Informatics, Scotland, fourth version edition, July. Available from http://www.hcrc.ed.ac.uk/˜ gnome. ↗
- M. Poesio. 2003. Associative descriptions and salience. In Proc. of the EACL Workshop on Computational Treatments of Anaphora, Budapest. find
- M. Poesio. 2004. An empirical investigation of definiteness. In S. Kepser, editor, Proc. of the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence, Tübingen, January. University of Tübingen, SFB 441. find
- C. L. Sidner. 1979. Towards a computational theory of definite anaphora comprehension in English discourse. Ph.D. thesis, MIT. find
- M. Strube and U. Hahn. 1999. Functional centering– grounding referential coherence in information structure. Computational Linguistics, 25(3):309–344. find our card
- K. van Deemter and R. Kibble. 2000. On coreferring: Coreference in MUC and related annotation schemes. Computational Linguistics, 26(4):629–637. Squib. find our card
- B. L. Webber. 1979. A Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora. Garland, New York. find
This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/poesio-2004-mate-gnome-proposals-anaphoric-annotation/