A sense-based lexicon of count and mass expressions: The Bochum English Countability Lexicon

A Sense-based Lexicon of Count and Mass Expressions: The Bochum English Countability Lexicon Tibor Kiss∗, F. Jeffry Pelletier†, Halima Husic∗, Johanna M. Poppek∗, R. Nino Simunic∗ ∗ Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany † Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Canada {tibor, husic, poppek, simunic}@linguistics.rub.de, jeffpell@sfu.ca Abstract The present paper describes the current release of the Bochum English Countability Lexicon (BECL 2.1), a large empirical database consisting of lemmata from Open ANC (http://www.anc.org) with added senses from WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998). BECL 2.1 contains ≈ 11,800 annotated noun-sense pairs, divided into four major countability classes and 18 fine-grained subclasses. In the current version, BECL also provides information on nouns whose senses occur in more than one class allowing a closer look on polysemy and homonymy with regard to countability. Further included are sets of similar senses using the Leacock and Chodorow (LCH) score for semantic similarity (Leacock & Chodorow, 1998), information on orthographic variation, on the completeness of all WordNet senses in the database and an annotated representation of different types of proper names. The further development of BECL will investigate the different countability classes of proper names and the general relation between semantic similarity and countability as well as recurring syntactic patterns for noun-sense pairs. Our current work on those patterns concerning mass nouns is briefly discussed pointing to further research. The BECL 2.1 database is also publicly available via http://count-and-mass.org. Keywords: countability, mass/count distinction, questionnaire-based lexical resource, lexicon, semantic similarity, proper names 1. Introduction The Bochum English Countability Lexicon (BECL) provides a large-scale publicly available resource for the analysis of the count/mass distinction (cf. http://count- and-mass.org). BECL addresses three problematic aspects in assessing the count/mass distinction: First, that the distinction can be applied to the lemma or lexeme (as e.g., in Grishman et al. (1994) and Bond (2007)). Secondly, the popular view that the distinction is a binary one (as exemplified in Borer, 2005 and ISO Space, 2014), and thirdly, that it can be analysed by looking at a small sample of staple nouns only. BECL replaces this methodology with over 11,800 annotated noun-sense pairs. A noun-sense pair is a combination of a noun with an individual sense of that noun. Noun-sense pairs in BECL fall into four major countability classes that are subdivided into 18 minor countability classes. The original annotations are provided with the resource, thus allowing users to assess the data directly. Further information on the initial annotation steps including inter-annotator agreement can be found in Kiss, Pelletier, and Stadtfeld (2014). An illustration of BECL is provided in (1). This paper describes the current release of BECL, includ- ing the definition of noun-sense pairs, the characterization of classes, nouns whose senses occur in more than one class, the usage of the Leacock and Chodorow (LCH) score for semantic similarity (Leacock and Chodorow, 1998), and the representation of proper names. 2. Noun Senses and Countability Classes in BECL All annotation in BECL applies at the level of the noun- sense pair. In replacing lexemes or lemmas as the locus of the count/mass …

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