Multi-class Animacy Classification with Semantic Features

Animacy is the semantic property of nouns denoting whether an entity can act, or is perceived as acting, of its own will. This property is marked grammatically in various languages, albeit rarely in English. It has recently been highlighted as a relevant property for NLP applications such as parsing and anaphora resolution. In order for animacy to be used in conjunction with other semantic features for such applications, appropriate data is necessary. However, the few corpora which do contain animacy annotation, rarely contain much other semantic information. The addition of such an annotation layer to a corpus already containing deep semantic annotation should therefore be of particular interest. The work presented in this paper contains three main contributions. Firstly, we improve upon the state of the art in multiclass animacy classification. Secondly, we use this classifier to contribute to the annotation of an openly available corpus containing deep semantic annotation. Finally, we provide source code, as well as trained models and scripts needed to reproduce the results presented in this paper, or aid in annotation of other texts.1