ISO/AWI 24617-12

Language resource management — Semantic annotation framework (SemAF) — Part 12: Quantification

Scope

This proposed deliverable specifies an annotation scheme for semantic information relating to quantification in natural language. Quantification occurs whenever a predicate is applied to sets of arguments (rather than to single arguments) and gives rise to (among other things) questions of relative scope, distributivity, determinacy, and cardinality of collections of arguments. These issues make quantification a major source of ambiguity.
The application of a predicate to sets of arguments occurs in two major positions in natural language: (a) in a main clause, when a verb is combined with its arguments, and (b) in a noun phrase, when a head noun is modified by adjectives, other nouns, prepositional phrases, possessive phrases, or relative clauses. The proposal specifies for both positions how the semantically relevant quantification aspects can be annotated, and provides a semantics for the annotations based on a combination of the theory of generalized quantifiers, Discourse Representation Theory, and event semantics.