Common Contracts

Inter-annotator Agreement on a Multilingual Semantic Annotation Task

March 6th, 2006

• Filed
  March 6th, 2006

Six sites participated in the Interlingual Annotation of Multilingual Text Corpora (IAMTC) project (Dorr et al., 2004; Farwell et al., 2004; Mitamura et al., 2004). Parsed versions of English translations of news articles in Arabic, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Spanish were annotated by up to ten annotators. Their task was to match open-class lexical items (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) to one or more concepts taken from the Omega ontology (Philpot et al., 2003), and to identify theta roles for verb arguments. The annotated corpus is intended to be a resource for meaning-based approaches to machine translation. Here we discuss inter-annotator agreement for the corpus. The annotation task is characterized by annotators’ freedom to select multiple concepts or roles per lexical item. As a result, the annotation categories are sets, the number of which is bounded only by the number of distinct annotator-lexical item pairs. We use a reliability metric designed to handle partial