Pragmatic annotation of a domain-restricted English-Spanish comparable corpus

Résumé

This paper explores the multi-layer annotation of a written domain-restricted English-Spanish comparable corpus (CLANES – Controlled LANguage English Spanish), focusing on pragmatic annotation. The annotation scheme draws on part of speech tagging and a semantic annotation scheme, i.e. the UCREL Semantic Analysis System, with some added categories to fit the food-and-drink domain represented in CLANES. These are used to build significant (pragmatic) metapatterns. Seven different pragmatic functions have been identified in our corpus, namely <STATE>, <DIRECT>, <SUGGEST>, <RECOMMEND>, <PRAISE>, <EVIDENCE> and <RELATE TO READER>. Computer scripts translate this linguistic information into regular expressions to be used in unsupervised annotation. Partial results indicate that applying lexical restrictors boosts the success rate considerably. However, metadata is preferred because of increased replicability and generality. Replicability issues and limitations encountered during testing are also addressed.