Principles for Annotation

Prefer Core Roles over Non-core Roles

Thus:

Rather than:

Try Adding Arguments

When not sure how to frame a predicate, it can help to think of additional arguments that the predicate could have and that are just not realized in this instance. For example, what is the role of It in It is not important? If we add an argument, we might get It is not important for the process, where INFLUENCE seems to fit with It as influence and the process as influenced. Thus:

Prefer to Avoid Stacking

If something could be framed with either a single frame or two stacked frames, prefer using a single frame.

Thus:

Rather than:

Prefer More Specific Frames

If not sure which of two frames to use, tend to prefer the more specific one. For example, if TIME and CONDITION would both fit and you feel that CONDITION is more specific, prefer CONDITION:

Similarly, if an argument can be seen as assigning a role to another argument, it is better to use META than, e.g., SITUATION:

Use Comments if Not Sure

You are encouraged to use comments to note down any doubts and thoughts. Comments can be added to the end of any line using the # symbol:

[TIME] generally (19) # ?
[has-time] fair (20)
[has-time] to - middling (24)

Obliqueness

Some annotation rules make reference to obliqueness, a concept used to rank dependents by the syntactic “coreness” of their role. For our purposes, nsubj dependents are least oblique, followed by obj, followed by iobj, followed by obl.

Terminology

This is a list of terms and how they are used in this manual (not necessarily in linguistics in general, though I try to be compatible with widespread usage).