Draw mir a Sheep: A Supersense-based Analysis of German Case and Adposition Semantics

Abstract

Adpositions and case markers are ubiquitous in natural language and express a wide range of meaning relations that can be of crucial relevance for many NLP and AI tasks. However, capturing their semantics in a comprehensive yet concise, as well as cross-linguistically applicable way has remained a challenge over the years. To address this, we adapt the largely language-agnostic SNACS framework to German, defining language-specific criteria for identifying adpositional expressions and piloting a supersense-annotated German corpus. We compare our approach with prior work on both German and multilingual adposition semantics, and discuss our empirical findings in the context of potential applications.