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<Paper uid="W04-0216">
  <Title>Animacy Encoding in English: why and how</Title>
  <Section position="14" start_page="2" end_page="3" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
7 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We are not aware of any other medium-scale attempts to annotate corpora of contemporary English for animacy information apart from the two mentioned here. There are smaller efforts concentrating on the genitive alternation (e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Leech et al., 1994, Anschutz, 1997, Stefanowitsch, 2000)  . The resources that have been created give robust results for the opposition 'human' versus 'nonconcrete' entities in the large sense (as the category was used as a catch-all). This should suffice for further inquiries about linguistic processes that are sensitive to a binary opposition in this dimension. Moreover the Stanford-Edinburgh effort is integrated in a corpus that has already been marked up for syntactic information, so correlations between syntactic constructions and animacy (and information status) should be easy to calculate. It is also the first effort that studies inter-annotator reliability.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Some studies based on the annotations are currently being conducted. The study by Cueni, Bresnan, Nikitina and Baayen (2004) supplements partial data from the work described here with further annotations. The work reported by O'Connor et al. (2004) derives from the Boston use of the encoding described here. Within the paraphrase project we are currently investigation 3 Some related work is done in the context of entity tracking sponsored by various US government programs (ACE, TIDES, etc.). The proposed annotation schemes have problems in distinguishing between persons and organizations or geo-political entities that are similar to ours, but the basic categories and the aims of these enterprises are different. We have not reviewed them here.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  the possible effect of animacy on constructions such as Left-Dislocation and Topicalization.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Further work remains to be done, however, to determine the exact nature of the distinctions in the animacy dimension that are important for English and for other languages. The annotations we provide do not settle this issue. In that sense they are insufficient to guide generation and translation precisely. To investigate this further we will need to devise more careful annotation schemes and approach the problem via experiments where the hypothesized relative animacy of various entities can be carefully controlled. As mentioned above, it might be better not to think in terms of robust large categories but rather try to rank specific entities or small categories relative to each other and to gradually build up a more precise picture. This is most likely better done through controlled experiments than through corpus annotation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The annotated corpus, however, will be helpful to determine where animacy plays a role and which other factors it interacts with. This knowledge will help devise more adequate generation and translation architectures.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> The Boston University noun Phrase Corpus is publicly available at http://np.corpus.bu.edu. The paraphrase corpus will be made available to subscribers to the Switchboard Corpus.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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