Annotating Abstract Pronominal Anaphora in the DAD Project

In this paper we present an extension of the MATE/GNOME annotation scheme for anaphora (Poesio, 2004) which accounts for abstract anaphora in Danish and Italian. By abstract anaphora it is here meant pronouns whose linguistic antecedents are verbal phrases, clauses and discourse segments. The extended scheme, which we call the DAD annotation scheme, allows to annotate information about abstract anaphora which is important to investigate their use, see i.a. (Webber, 1988; Gundel et al., 2003; Navarretta, 2004; Navarretta, 2007) and which can influence their automatic treatment. Intercoder agreement scores obtained by applying the DAD annotation scheme on texts and dialogues in the two languages are given and show that the information proposed in the scheme can be recognised in a reliable way.