Issues and Challenges in Annotating Urdu Action Verbs on the IMAGACT4ALL Platform

Issues and Challenges in Annotating Urdu Action Verbs on the IMAGACT4ALL Platform Sharmin Muzaffar, Pitambar Behera & Girish Nath Jha Aligarh Muslim University, Jawaharlal Nehru University Centre for Linguistics {sharmin.muzaffar, pitambarbehera2, girishjha}@gmail.com Abstract In South-Asian languages such as Hindi and Urdu, action verbs having compound constructions and serial verbs constructions pose serious problems for natural language processing and other linguistic tasks. Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by 51, 500, 0001 speakers in India. Action verbs that occur spontaneously in day-to-day communication are highly ambiguous in nature semantically and as a consequence cause disambiguation issues that are relevant and applicable to Language Technologies (LT) like Machine Translation (MT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). IMAGACT4ALL is an ontology-driven web-based platform developed by the University of Florence for storing action verbs and their inter-relations. This group is currently collaborating with Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in India to connect Indian languages on this platform. Action verbs are frequently used in both written and spoken discourses and refer to various meanings because of their polysemic nature. The IMAGACT4ALL platform stores each 3d animation image, each one of them referring to a variety of possible ontological types, which in turn makes the annotation task for the annotator quite challenging with regard to selecting verb argument structure having a range of probability distribution. The authors, in this paper, discuss the issues and challenges such as complex predicates (compound and conjunct verbs), ambiguously animated video illustrations, semantic discrepancies, and the factors of verb-selection preferences that have produced significant problems in annotating Urdu verbs on the IMAGACT ontology. Keywords: Action verbs; Compound verbs; Complex predicates; Conjunct verbs; Computational semantics; Semantic discrepancy; IMAGACT ontology. 1. Introduction Action verbs are those which refer to activities and are the center of the predicate in any utterance or sentence. These verbs are the “most frequent structuring elements of the discourse” (Moneglia et al., 2012) in the communication process in any natural language of the world. Every language in the world categorizes actions in their own way which prevents the smooth functioning of NLP (Natural Language Processing), MT (Machine Translation) and other language technologies. Owing to the fact that they are ‘polysemous’ in nature (Moneglia et al., 2012); they often cause ambiguities that lead to various types of difficulties for the NLP technologies while processing. Fig 1: IMAGACT Log-in Page IMAGACT is a corpus-based ontology of action verbs 1 http://www.ethnologue.com/17/country/IN/languages/ 2 www.http://imagact.it/ which aims at setting up cross-linguistic ontology for disambiguation tasks in this crucial area of the lexicon (Moneglia et al., 2012) that deals with lexical semantics. It contains visual prototypes, but not definitions representing actions and thereby allows the exhibitions of typological variations across languages in transparent and informative manner. Figure 1 is a snapshot of the IMAGACT User log- in page. 1.1 The IMAGACT4ALL Platform The IMAGACT data accounts for the semantic competence, separating the contexts from the metaphorical and the idiomatic expressions. Action verbs refer to a set of variety of possible ontological types which makes the task of …

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