Describedwhether

Describedwhether is a term used in linguistics and natural language processing to denote whether a given proposition or topic has been described within a discourse. As both a descriptive annotation and a semantic operator, it supports analyses of how texts manage description and description status across sentences and passages.

The term was proposed in corpus linguistics and NLP literature in the early 2020s to standardize annotation of description status. The name describes the boolean nature of the status: the value is either true (a description exists) or false (no description).

Formally, describedwhether(P) yields a truth value indicating whether the discourse contains an explicit description of proposition P. In annotated corpora, it can be written as DW(P), acting as a property attached to the proposition within the discourse. The operator is designed to be language-agnostic while leveraging language-specific cues for description.

Applications include discourse analysis, information extraction, and natural language generation. Researchers use describedwhether to study how writers and models balance describing details with relying on shared background knowledge, and to guide generation systems on when to furnish descriptive material to ensure specific understanding.

Examples:

DW('project_completion') = true in the sentence "The project was completed on schedule."

DW('project_completion') = false in "The project was reviewed" where no explicit description of completion is provided.

See also: description, discourse marker, annotation scheme, pragmatic marker.