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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 (link with anchor). 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.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Coreference resolution

Cited by

45 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 13 of them have a page here, 32 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@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

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