Annotating the Structure and Semantics of Fables

Annotating the Structure and Semantics of Fables  Oi Yee Kwong Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong Olivia.Kwong@cityu.edu.hk Abstract. This paper outlines an annotation scheme we developed for a corpus of fables. Reference is made to previous studies on discourse structure and story grammar, as well as discourse relations and text coherence. The applicability and adequacy of the various frameworks for annotating and analysing fables are considered. The current work addresses several issues including the basic units for discourse segments, the distinction between structure and semantics in stories, the characteristics of fables, and the practicality and annotator-friendliness of the annotation scheme. A concise set of structural and semantic tags is thus synergised and applied. Some interim results and future directions are discussed. Keywords: Corpus annotation, Discourse relations, Narrative structure, Fables.  The work described in this paper was supported by a grant from City University of Hong Kong (Project No. 7008064). Copyright 2011 by Oi Yee Kwong 1 Introduction Stories are distinguished from other genres of discourse by their unique coherent structures and discourse relations. As a special kind of stories, fables share the typical structural and semantic properties of stories, and are often associated with a moral. It is thus even more cognitively demanding to understand fables than stories in general. Apart from the temporal and causal relations among the events happening in the story, one needs to figure out the lesson intended by the storyteller. Interestingly, the same fable could be retold in different ways, where storytellers deploy a wide range of lexico-grammatical constructions, rhetorical devices, and discourse strategies, within specific narrative structures, to convey the moral invariably. Hence, fables are often semantically deep despite their apparently simple structures. To provide a useful resource for research on story understanding, a corpus containing various published versions of the Aesop’s Fables in English and Chinese is compiled. In this paper, we discuss the annotation scheme developed for marking up the discourse structure and semantics of the fables. In Section 2, we briefly review related work on discourse structure and story structure, and evaluate the applicability and adequacy of the various frameworks for annotating and analysing fables. The issue of basic analysis unit is addressed in Section 3. A concise set of structural and semantic tags is synergised, as described in Section 4 and Section 5. The paper is concluded with the work in progress and future directions in Section 6. 2 Related Work 2.1 Discourse Structure and Relation Grosz and Sidner’s (1986) computational model suggests that discourse structure comprises (1) a linguistic structure consisting of the discourse segments and some embedding relationship 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 275–282 275 that can hold between them, (2) an intentional structure accounting for the discourse purpose and individual discourse segment purposes, and (3) an attentional state dynamically recording the objects, properties and relations salient to the participants’ focus of attention as their discourse unfolds. The intentional structure …

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