The Semantics of Semantic Annotation

This is a speculative paper, describing a recently started effort to give a formal semantics to semantic annotation schemes. Semantic annotations are intended to capture certain semantic information in a text, which means that it only makes sense to use semantic annotations if these have a well-defined semantics. In practice, however, semantic annotation schemes are used that lack any formal semantics. In this paper we outline how existing approaches to the annotation of temporal information, semantic roles, and reference relations can be integrated in a single XML-based format and can be given a formal semantics by translating them into second-order logic. This is argued to offer an incremental aproach to the incorporation of semantic information in natural language processing that does not suffer from the problems of ambiguity and lack of robustness that are common to traditional approaches to computational semantics.