Cross-Linguistic Situation Entity Segmentation for Discourse Analysis in Diachronic English and German Text

Situation Entity (SE) segmentation identifies clause-like discourse units focusing on verb constellations.While SE segmentation has been applied to contemporary English as a subtask of SE annotation, systematic guidelines for syntactically ambiguous constructions remain underspecified.We present principled SE segmentation guidelines for contemporary and historical varieties of English and German.Our inter-annotator agreement studies on Late Modern English (1700-1900) and New High German (1650-1900) corpora demonstrate substantial agreement.Using the existing SitEnt corpus in contemporary English, we implement a new automatic segmenter based on XLM-RoBERTa.Our evaluation examines cross-variety and cross-lingual generalization, demonstrating challenges both for human annotation efforts and in transferring segmenters trained on contemporary English to historical varieties.Our code and data are publicly available.1