Coarse Lexical Semantic Annotation with Supersenses: An Arabic Case Study

“Lightweight” semantic annotation of text calls for a simple representation, ideally without requiring a semantic lexicon to achieve good coverage in the language and domain. In this paper, we repurpose WordNet’s supersense tags for annotation, developing specific guidelines for nominal expressions and applying them to Arabic Wikipedia articles in four topical domains. The resulting corpus has high coverage and was completed quickly with reasonable inter-annotator agreement.