Hi, > On 24. Oct 2020, at 15:12, Peter Klügl <[email protected]> wrote: > > Yes, there needs to be some additional changes then. In my opinion, it's > ok if ADJACENT doe not imply OVERLAPPING. Just by listening to it, it > sounds also somwhat reasonable. Afterall, it's just a name for a > predicate configuration. > > For zero-length annotations, OVERLAPPING would still apply due to the > inner minimal span that is not ADJACENT.
Thinking more about it, I am starting to believe that we should not try to approach the nature of zero-width spans by observing how a infinitely small span would behave but rather be considering their nature of not having any width at all. So what does that mean? COVERED-BY: we need to decide if a zero-width span at the start/end of another span is covered by the other span or not. For a symmetric approach, the same decision should be made irrespective of whether the zero-width span is located at the start or end of the other span. Let's say we want to query for all annotations on a sentence, we'd almost certainly want to include any zero-width annotations at the start and end of the sentence - so: let's say a zero-width annotation is at the start/end of another annotation is ALWAYS COVERED BY this other annotation. LEFT/RIGHT ADJACENT: in order for a span X to be adjacent to a span Y, X should start/end at the same location as Y. However, it seems quite contradictory that a span can be simultaneously COVERED-BY and ADJACENT. So as a consequence of the choice on COVERED-BY above, a zero-width span at the start/end of another span should NOT be considered adjacent. We would say that X is right/left adjacent to Y if it starts/ends at the same the size of the intersection between X and Y is zero. That implies that zero-width annotations are NEVER ADJACENT. LEFT/RIGHT OVERLAPPING: if an X annotation is left or right overlapping another annotation Y, it implies that some part of X is outside the boundaries of Y. That, however, would contradict the choice we made for covered-by above for zero-width annotations. That implies that a zero-width annotation at the start/end of another annotation is NEVER LEFT/RIGHT OVERLAPPING that other annotation. LEFT-OF/RIGHT OF: if a zero-width annotation X at the start/end of another annotation Y is not adjacent because it it covered, than that implies that is is also not left-of/right-of. IMHO these interpretations above are symmetric and also avoid the odd case of two colocated zero-width spans being simultaneously left(overlapping) and right(overlapping) etc. of themselves. I have added a matrix using the rationales given above in the Google Sheets document on sheet "Relation types in detail (WN, WWv2)" in the "Left wide, right wide" column group. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fgMbqVlxwJSBNui7Y_phtRYEhzr_rfXQ5ZUREH1-nwI/edit?usp=sharing Cheers, -- Richard
