The document discusses the creation of a corpus for analyzing the prosody-semantic interface in Seoul Korean, focusing on syntactic ambiguity that can be resolved through prosody. The corpus contains 1,292 sentences and 3,552 tagged scripts that include various intention types, evidentiality, and politeness. This new corpus aims to advance studies in phonetics, syntax, semantics, and second language acquisition, as well as computational linguistics.

1. Prosody-Semantic Interface in Seoul Korean:
Corpus for a Disambiguation of Wh- intervention
Won Ik Cho¹*, Jeonghwa Cho²*, Jeemin Kang², Nam Soo Kim¹
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and INMC¹,
Department of English Language and Literature²,
Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
E-mail: wicho@hi.snu.ac.kr, {jeong9793, bling1104, nkim}@snu.ac.kr
Introduction
- Korean as a head-final and wh-in-situ language
• Sentence type is decided by sentence-final intonation for
some sentence enders (declarative vs. interrogative)
• Accent (pitch and duration) around wh-particles sometimes
makes them in-situ (as a existential quantifier)
• Overall prosody determines the presence of rhetoricalness
for some question/commands
- ...And so far in corpus-based approach?
• Little study done on comprehensive analysis on ambiguity
regarding various intention types (other than questions)
• Small amount of corpora dedicated to handling ambiguous
utterances
• ...Thus, uprising demand for a corpus on sentence
ambiguity in the areas of prosody-semantics, L2 acquisition
& computational linguistics
- How about constructing a corpus that contains ONLY the
utterances whose syntactic ambiguity can be resolved
by introducing prosody?
Corpus Generation
- Wh- particles
• 누구 (nwukwu, who), 뭐 (mwe, what),
어디 (eti, where), 언제 (encey, when),
어떻게 (ettehkey, how), 몇 (myech, how much)
• 왜 (way, why) was not utilized because it is not used as an
existential quantifier
- Predicates
• Depend on the wh- particle being adopted
• Chosen among 5,800 frequently used lexicons
• Pronouns and polarity items were added in some cases
- Reportive particles
• Added to form an evidential mood
• Induces rhetoricalness for some questions
- Sentence enders (SEs)
• SEs with an unfixed role (underspecified SE)
• e.g. -래 (ray), -어 (e), -지 (ci)
• SEs with a fixed role
• e.g. -까 (kka: interrogative)
- Politeness suffix
• Attached at the end of a sentence to assign politeness
• Restricts rhetoricalness under some circumstances
Tagging Intention
- Intention as an extended discourse component:
generation/tagging done by 3 Korean native speakers (by
unanimous consent)
• Statement (e.g., Somebody is going to bring it)
• Yes/no question (e.g., Did somebody tell you to bring it)
• Wh- question (e.g., Who's going to bring it?)
• Rhetorical question (e.g., Who says I'll bring it)
• Command (e.g., Somebody told you to bring it)
• Request (e.g., Can somebody bring it)
• Rhetorical command (e.g., See who brings it)
Corpus Description
- Specification
• 1,292 sentences
• 3,552 scripts tagged with intention
• Along with English translation
• Arranged in 1. the order of wh-particles, and then 2. the
lexicographical order of the predicates
• Evidentiality and politeness were tagged
• Affirmative questions were noted
• RQ/Cs were annotated with implicit meaning
• Recordings of male/female voice (7,104 in total)
- Statistics (in volume)
• Who > What > How much > Where > When > How
• The most frequent type: [S, YN, WH] (424/1,292)
• The least frequent type: [WH, R] (22/1,292)
• Wh- intervention occurs largely among how much sentences
• Rhetoricalness is the most frequent with when, and the least
frequent with how much
• Commands with how are scarce, since they result in unclear
instructions
Conclusion
- A new type of corpus, which consists of syntactically
ambiguous sentences that are disambiguated by introducing
prosody, is provided along with generation scheme
- Will be useful in qualitative studies on phonetics-syntax-
semantics interface and L2 acquisition, and quantitative
studies regarding computational linguistics