Developing a large semantically annotated corpus

What would be a good method to provide a large collection of semantically annotated texts with formal, deep semantics rather than shallow? We argue that a bootstrapping approach comprising state-of-the-art NLP tools for parsing and semantic interpretation, in combination with a wiki-like interface for collaborative annotation of experts, and a game with a purpose for crowdsourcing, are the starting ingredients for fulfilling this enterprise. The result is a semantic resource that anyone can edit and that integrates various phenomena, including predicate-argument structure, scope, tense, thematic roles, rhetorical relations and presuppositions, into a single semantic formalism: Discourse Representation Theory. Taking texts rather than sentences as the units of annotation results in deep semantic representations that incorporate discourse structure and dependencies. To manage the various (possibly conflicting) annotations provided by experts and non-experts, we introduce a method that stores “Bits of Wisdom” in a database as stand-off annotations.