Semantic Annotation of Anaphoric Links in Language

The main purpose of this paper is to make some linguistic contributions to an ISO initiative to formulate a standard on the semantic annotation framework of reference, coreference, and other types of anaphoric phenomena in natural language. For this purpose, we first make a brief review of some of the existing coreference annotation (CA) schemes. We then formulate an abstract syntax Asyn ana for anaphoric annotation on which a variety of concrete syntaxes such as an XML-based concrete syntax Csyn anaX can be developed to provide an interoperable representation format for the annotation. To satisfy the semantic adequacy of the proposed abstract syntax even partially, we check the possibility of developing formal semantics based on it. Such a semantics may be accepted as a valid application of the proposed annotation scheme. We finally consider the multilingual applicability of proposed ASyn ana by applying it to Korean, a non-inflectional agglutinating language with pro-drop properties.