Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Between Binding and Accommodation
CATEGORY(TAG) DESCRIPTION
coreference(=) refers to something mentioned earlier in the text
new(N) new to you, new to text, not related, not described
related(R) is related to something earlier in the text, but isn‘t the same thing - no
description nearby
described(D) self-explanatory because of how it is described, also new
calculable(C) using information about a reference time or a reference place you can
figure out what this means
known(K) everyone knows what this is, its general knowledge, but this entity is
new in the text
Expression(E) the NP is part of an expression or idiom and does not really point out a
real entity
other(O) does not’ fit into the above categories, explain why
Table 11 Categories for annotating definite NPs
The examples which were categorized as calculable (C) are often considered
deictic. The purpose of this category was to separate out examples that were
dependent on the time and place of the dialogue. 10 For coreference (=) and related
(R) the annotators had to identify the antecedent, alternatively the anchor that they
considered the interpretation of the definite to be dependent on, and if there was
more than one potential anchor/antecedent, they were to take the most linearly
recent one.
The level of annotator agreement in the current annotation was much lower
than for the material and annotation schemes reported on in Poesio & Vieira
(1998). A Kappa score calculated on a subset of the data was only = 0.45 11 ,
compared to 0.68 for the structurally based categories, and 0.58 for the semantically
based categories in the annotation experiments done by Poesio & Vieira (1998).
There are two possible explanations for this result. One may be that spoken
language is more vague and this may have led to less clear-cut examples of each
type (cf. Eckert & Strube 2000, (p. 82), who found that 77 of 264 pronouns in
annotation of spontaneous spoken dialogues were classified as “vague.”) The
second, more likely reason, is that a classification task cannot be done with these
categories. This may be either because the categories are incorrect or because the
definitions of the categories are not clear. However, I believe the main reason for
the low-level of annotator agreement is that some of the assumptions that lie
behind the whole task are incorrect, namely the assumption that it is possible to
10 There seems to be no real consensus on where the distinction between deictic items and
anaphoric items should be drawn as most expressions are context-dependent (see the discussion
in Levinson, 1997) so the potential distinction is ignored.
11 This was done on the data before it was stored in a database, and there are numerous errors in
how it was calculated. However, I do not believe the agreement would have been so much higher
if it had been calculated precisely.
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