Annotation of Quantification: The Current State of ISO 24617-12

This paper discusses the current state of developing an ISO standard annotation scheme for quantification phenomena in natural language, as part of the ISO Semantic Annotation Framework (ISO 24617). A proposed approach that combines ideas from the theory of generalised quantifiers and from neo-Davidsonian event semantics was adopted by the ISO organisation in 2019 as a starting point for developing such an annotation scheme. * This scheme consists of (1) a conceptual {`}metamodel{'} that visualises the types of entities, functions and relations that go into annotations of quantification; (2) an abstract syntax which defines {`}annotation structures{'} as triples and other set-theoretic constructs; (3) an XML-based representation of annotation structures ({`}concrete syntax{'}); and (4) a compositional semantics of annotation structures. The latter three components together define the interpreted markup language QuantML. The focus in this paper is on the structuring of the semantic information needed to characterise quantification in natural language and the representation of these structures in QuantML.