Animacy Encoding in English: Why and How

Animacy Encoding in English: why and how Annie Zaenen PARC & Stanford University 3333 Coyote Hill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304] zaenen@parc.com Jean Carletta HCRC-University of Edinburgh 2, Buccleuch Place Edinburgh EH8LW, UK J.Carletta@Edinburgh.ac.uk Gregory Garretson Boston University Program in Applied Linguistics 96 Cummington St., Boston, MA 02215 gregory@bu.edu Joan Bresnan CSLI-Stanford University 220, Panama Street Stanford CA 94305 bresnan@stanford.edu Andrew Koontz-Garboden CSLI-Stanford University 220, Panama Street Stanford CA 94305 andrewkg@csli.stanford.edu Tatiana Nikitina CSLI-Stanford University 220, Panama Street Stanford CA 94305 tann@Stanford.edu M. Catherine O’Connor Boston University Program in Applied Linguistics 96 Cummington St., Boston, MA 02215 mco@bu.edu Tom Wasow CSLI-Stanford University 220, Panama Street Stanford CA 94305 wasow@csli.stanford.edu Abstract We report on two recent medium-scale initiatives annotating present day English corpora for animacy distinctions. We discuss the relevance of animacy for computational linguistics, specifically generation, the annotation categories used in the two studies and the interannotator reliability for one of the studies. 1 Introduction It has long been known that animacy is an important category in syntactic and morphological natural language analysis. It is less evident that this dimension should play an important role in practical natural language processing. After reviewing some linguistic facts, we argue that it does play a role in natural language generation and translation, describe a schema for the annotation of animacy distinctions, evaluate the reliability of the scheme and discuss some results obtained. We conclude with some remarks on the importance of animacy and other accessibility dimensions for the architecture of generation schemes 2 The animacy dimension in natural language The animacy hierarchy is one of the accessibility scales that are hypothesized to influence the grammatical prominence that is given to the realization of entities within a discourse. Three important scales (sometimes conflated into one, also called animacy hierarchy in Silverstein, 1976), are the definiteness, the person and the animacy hierarchy proper. We assume these are three different hierarchies that refer to different aspects of entity representation within language: the definiteness dimension is linked to the status of the entity at a particular point in the discourse, the person hierarchy depends on the participants within the discourse, and the animacy status is an inherent characteristic of the entities referred to. Each of these aspects, however, orders entities on a scale that makes them more or less salient or ‘accessible’ when humans use their language. The importance of accessibility scales is not widely recognized in computational treatments of natural language. This contrasts with the situation in linguistics where such scales have been recognized as playing an important role in the organization of sentence syntax and discourse. Even in natural language studies, however, their importance has been underestimated because the role of these scales is not always to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical utterances but often that of distinguishing mainly between felicitous and infelicitous ones, especially in languages such as English. Grammaticality and acceptability As long as one’s attention is limited to the distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, the importance of the animacy hierarchy in …

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