ISO/TC 37/SC 4/WG 2 - Semantic annotation

This document covers the measurable or magnitudinal aspect of quantity so that it can focus on the technical or practical use of measurements in IR (information retrieval), QA (question answering), TS (text summarization), and other NLP (natural language processing) applications. It is applicable to the domains of technology that carry more applicational relevance than some theoretical issues found in the ordinary use of language. NOTE ISO 24617-12 deals with more general and theoretical issues of quantification and quantitative information. This document also treats temporal durations that are discussed in ISO 24617-1, and spatial measures such as distances that are treated ISO 24617-7, while making them interoperable with other measure types. It also accommodates the treatment of measures or amounts that are introduced in ISO 24617‑6:2016, 8.3.

This document provides a set of empirically and theoretically well-motivated concepts for dialogue annotation, a formal language for expressing dialogue annotations (the Dialogue Act Markup Language, DiAML), and a method for segmenting a dialogue into semantic units. This allows the manual or automatic annotation of dialogue segments with information about the communicative actions which the participants perform by their contributions to the dialogue. The annotation scheme specified in this document supports multidimensional annotation of spoken, written, and multimodal dialogues involving two or more participants. Dialogue units are viewed as having multiple communicative functions in different dimensions. The markup language DiAML has an XML-based representation format and a formal semantics which makes it possible to perform inferences with DiAML representations. This document also specifies data categories for dimensions of dialogue analysis, for communicative functions, for dialogue act qualifiers, and for relations between dialogue acts. Additionally, it provides mechanisms for customizing these sets of concepts, extending them with application-specific or domain-specific concepts and descriptions of semantic content, or selecting relevant coherent subsets of them. These mechanisms make the dialogue act concepts specified in this document useful not only for annotation but also for the recognition and generation of dialogue acts in interactive systems.

This document provides a framework for encoding a broad range of spatial information and spatiotemporal information relating to motion as expressed in natural language texts. This document includes references to locations, general spatial entities, spatial relations (involving topological, orientational, and metric values), dimensional information, motion events, paths, and event-paths triggered by motions.

This document provides a comprehensive model for the annotation and representation of referential phenomena in natural language texts and multimodal interactions. Such phenomena can cover simple anaphoric or coreferential mechanisms as well as more complex bridging or multimodal mechanisms. It provides a reference serialisation in XML defined as a customisation of the TEI P5 guidelines. In addition, the document describes the core data categories related to referential entities and link structures, and also needed for the description of annotation schemes and serialisation mechanisms for implementing conformant models as concrete data formats.

ISO 24617-8:2016 establishes the representation and annotation of local, "low-level" discourse relations between situations mentioned in discourse, where each relation is annotated independently of other relations in the same discourse. ISO 24617-8:2016 provides a basis for annotating discourse relations by specifying a set of core discourse relations, many of which have similar definitions in different frameworks. To the extent possible, this document provides mappings of the semantics across the different frameworks. ISO 24617-8:2016 is applicable to two different situations: - for annotating discourse relations in natural language corpora; - as a target representation of automatic methods for shallow discourse parsing, for summarization, and for other applications. The objectives of this specification are to provide: - a reference set of data categories that define a collection of discourse relation types with an explicit semantics; - a pivot representation based on a framework for defining discourse relations that can facilitate mapping between different frameworks; - a basis for developing guidelines for creating new resources that will be immediately interoperable with pre-existing resources. With respect to discourse structure, the limitation of this document to specifications for annotating local, "low-level" discourse relations is based on the view that (a) the analysis at this level is what is well understood and can be clearly defined; (b) further extensions to represent higher-level, global discourse structure is possible where desired; and (c) that it allows for the resulting annotations to be compatible across frameworks, even when they are based on different theories of discourse structure. As a part of the ISO 24617 semantic annotation framework ("SemAF"), the present DR-core standard aims to be transparent in its relation to existing frameworks for discourse relation annotation, but also to be compatible with other ISO 24617 parts. Some discourse relations are specific to interactive discourse, and give rise to an overlap with ISO 24617 Part 2, the ISO standard for dialogue act annotation. Other discourse relations relate to time, and their annotation forms part of ISO 24617‑1 (time and events); still other discourse relations are very similar to certain predicate-argument relations ("semantic roles"), whose annotation is the subject matter of ISO 24617‑4. Since the various parts are required to form a consistent whole, this document pays special attention to the interactions of discourse relation annotation and other semantic annotation schemes (see Clause 8). ISO 24617-8:2016 does not consider global, higher-level discourse structure representation which involves linking local discourse relations to form one or more composite global structures. ISO 24617-8:2016 is, moreover, restricted to strictly semantic relations, to the exclusion of, for example, presentational relations, which concern the way in which a text is presented to its readers or the way in which speakers structure their contributions in a spoken dialogue.

ISO 24617-6:2016 specifies the approach to semantic annotation characterizing the ISO Semantic annotation framework (SemAF). It outlines the SemAF strategy for developing separate annotation schemes for certain classes of semantic phenomena, aiming in the long term to combine these into a single, coherent scheme for semantic annotation with wide coverage. In particular, it sets out the notions of both an abstract and a concrete syntax for semantic annotations, mirroring the distinction between annotations and representations that is made in the ISO Linguistic Annotation Framework. It describes the role of these notions in relation to the specification of a metamodel and a semantic interpretation of annotations, with a view to defining a well-founded annotation scheme. ISO 24617-6:2016 also provides guidelines for dealing with two issues regarding the annotation schemes defined in SemAF-parts: a) conceptual and terminological inconsistencies that may arise due to overlaps between annotation schemes and b) the treatment of semantic phenomena that cut across SemAF-parts, such as negation, modality and quantification. Instances of both issues are identified, and in some cases, direction is given as to how they may be tackled.

The aim of ISO 24617-4:2014 is to propose a consensual annotation scheme for semantic roles; that is to say, a scheme that indicates the role that a participant plays in an event or state, as described mostly by a verb, and typically providing answers to questions such as "?who' did ?what' to ?whom'", and ?when', ?where', ?why', and ?how'. This includes not only the semantic relations between a verb and its arguments but also those relations that are relevant for other predicative elements such as nominalizations, nouns, adjectives, and predicate modifiers; the predicating role of adverbs and the use of coercion fall outside the scope of ISO 24617-4:2014.

Temporal information in natural language texts is an increasingly important component to the understanding of those texts. ISO 24617-1:2012, SemAF-Time, specifies a formalized XML-based markup language called ISO-TimeML, with a systematic way to extract and represent temporal information, as well as to facilitate the exchange of temporal information, both between operational language processing systems and between different temporal representation schemes. The use of guidelines for temporal annotation has been fully attested with examples from the TimeBank corpus, a collection of 183 documents that have been annotated by TimeML before the current version of ISO-TimeML was formulated.

ISO 24617-7:2014 provides a framework for encoding a broad range not only of spatial information, but also of spatiotemporal information relating to motion as expressed in natural language texts. It includes references to locations, general spatial entities, spatial relations (involving topological, orientational, and metric values), dimensional information, motion events, and paths.

ISO 24617-2:2012 provides a set of empirically and theoretically well-motivated concepts for dialogue annotation, a formal language for expressing dialogue annotations -- the dialogue act markup language (DiAML) -- and a method for segmenting a dialogue into semantic units. This allows the manual or automatic annotation of dialogue segments with information about the communicative actions which the participants perform by their contributions to the dialogue. It supports multidimensional annotation, in which units in dialogue are viewed as having multiple communicative functions. The DiAML language has an XML-based representation format and a formal semantics which makes it possible to apply inference to DiAML representations. ISO 24617-2:2012 specifies data categories for reference sets of communicative functions and dimensions of dialogue analysis and provides principles and guidelines for extending these sets or selecting coherent subsets of them. Additionally, it provides guidelines for annotators and annotated examples. It is applicable to spoken, written and multimodal dialogues involving two or more participants.