Verbclasses in German Prose

This is a German annotated dataset of the Levin verbclasses as understood by Wordnet/Germanet. We annotated five different German prose texts. Below we list the number of annotations for each text.

	Annotator 1	Annotator 2	Annotator 3	Fleiss' Kappa
Das Erdbeben in Chili	666	725	677	0.64
Der blonde Eckbert	898	930	54	0.85
Die Judenbuche	52	0	2269	0.73
Die Verwandlung	2296	2283	53	0.69
Krambambuli	135	0	507	0.76

In the json file annotation_data.json contains all annotations in our dataset. The format of the file is as follows, where spans hold indices into the full text.

{
  "Text Name": {
    "full_text": "The full text of the document", 
    "Annotator 1" [{
      "tag": "tag",
      "spans": [[10, 15]]
    }, ...],
    "Annotator 2" : [{
      ...
    }, ...]
  }
}

In splits we give the data corresponding to the datasplits we used in our paper. This data is intended for comparing against our experimental results.

splits
├── verb_classes_dev.jsonl       # Contains the development data, a stratified sample of all classes only taken from two texts ('Das Erdbeben in Chili' and ''Die Judenbuche'') 
├── verb_classes_dev_more.jsonl  # The rest of the data from ('Das Erdbeben in Chili' and ''Die Judenbuche'')
└── verb_classes_test.jsonl      # The test split, i.e. the texts that were not used in the development phase. ('Krambambuli', and 'Die Verwandlung', 'Der blonde Eckbert')

License

This dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0).

To view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Citation

Under this license, you are required to give appropriate credit. If you use this dataset in your research, please cite it as follows:

Plain Text: Hatzel, Hans Ole, Haimo Stiemer, Evelyn Gius, and Chris Biemann. (2025). Scalable Verb-Based Literary Semantics. In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Computational Humanities Research (CHR 2025). Luxembourg.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{hatzel_scalable_2025,
  author    = {Hatzel, Hans Ole and Stiemer, Haimo and Gius, Evelyn and Biemann, Chris},
  title     = {Scalable Verb-Based Literary Semantics},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Computational Humanities Research (CHR 2025)},
  year      = {2025},
  address   = {Belval, Luxembourg}
}