Building a reference lexicon for countability in English

The present paper describes the construction of a resource to determine the lexical preference class of a large number of English nouns (≈ 14,000) with respect to the distinction between mass and count interpretations. In constructing the lexicon, we have employed a questionnaire-based approach based on existing resources such as the Open ANC (http://www.anc.org) and WordNet (Miller, 1995). The questionnaire requires annotators to answer six questions about a noun-sense pair. Depending on the answers, a given noun-sense pair can be assigned to fine-grained noun classes, spanning the area between count and mass. The reference lexicon contains almost 14,000 noun-sense pairs. An initial data set of 1,000 has been annotated together by four native speakers, while the remaining 12,800 noun-sense pairs have been annotated in parallel by two annotators each. We can confirm the general feasibility of the approach by reporting satisfactory values between 0.694 and 0.755 in inter-annotator agreement using Krippendorff’s α.