Annotating Speech, Attitude and Perception Reports

Abstract

We present REPORTS, an annotation scheme for the annotation of speech, attitude and perception reports. The scheme makes it possible to annotate the various text elements involved in such reports (e.g. embedding entity, complement, complement head) and their relations in a uniform way, which in turn facilitates the automatic extraction of information on, for example, complementation and vocabulary distribution. We also present the Ancient Greek corpus RAG (Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War), to which we have applied this scheme using the annotation tool BRAT. We discuss some of the issues, both theoretical and practical, that we encountered, show how the corpus helps in answering specific questions about narrative perspective and the relation between report type and complement type, and conclude that REPORTS fitted in well with our needs.