From Form to Meaning: The Case of Particles within the Prague Dependency Treebank Annotation Scheme
Marie Mikulova, Barbora Štěpánková, Jan Štěpánek
Abstract
In the last decades, computational linguistics has become increasingly interested in annotation schemes that aim at an adequate description of the meaning of the sentences and texts. Discussions are ongoing on an appropriate annotation scheme for a large and complex amount of diverse information. In this contribution devoted to description of polyfunctional uninflected words (namely particles), i.e. words which, although having only one paradigmatic form, can have several different syntactic functions and even express relatively different semantic distinctions, we argue that it is the multi-layer system (linked from meaning to text) that allows a comprehensive description of the relations between morphological properties, syntactic function and expressed meaning, and thus contributes to greater accuracy in the description of the phenomena concerned and to the overall consistency of the annotated data. These aspects are demonstrated within the Prague Dependency Treebank annotation scheme, whose pioneering proposal can be found in the first COLING proceedings from 1965 (Sgall 1965), and to this day, the concept has proved to be sound and serves very well for complex annotation.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{mikulova-etal-2025-form,
title = "From Form to Meaning: The Case of Particles within the {P}rague Dependency Treebank Annotation Scheme",
author = "Mikulova, Marie and
{\v{S}}t{\v{e}}p{\'a}nkov{\'a}, Barbora and
{\v{S}}t{\v{e}}p{\'a}nek, Jan",
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.147/",
pages = "2163--2175"
}