markingwhether

Markingwhether is a proposed linguistic annotation approach focused on identifying and labeling occurrences of whether-clauses in text and speech. It treats the conjunction or complementizer whether as a distinct grammatical and semantic unit whose presence affects interpretation, question-formation, and information structure. The term emphasizes the act of marking or tagging these clauses within annotated corpora for downstream analysis.

In practice, markingwhether involves delimiting the boundaries of a whether-clause and assigning metadata about its function, scope, and type. Typical labels may include the clause’s syntactic role (complement versus adjunct), whether the clause is embedded in a yes–no question or in declarative discourse, and the discourse function (inquiry, uncertainty, reported speech). For example, in the sentence “She asked whether he would attend,” a markingwhether annotation would mark the embedded clause “whether he would attend” and note its function as a reported inquiry. A sentence like “I don’t know whether it is true” would similarly tag the embedded clause and its epistemic stance.

Applications of markingwhether span natural language processing tasks such as information extraction, question answering, machine translation, and syntactic/semantic parsing. By explicitly marking whether-clauses, systems can better handle ambiguity between whether- and if- constructions, resolve scope of negation, and improve cross-linguistic transfer in multilingual corpora. Related concepts include complementizers, embedded questions, and datasets from Universal Dependencies or FrameNet. Limitations include cross-linguistic variation and annotation consistency challenges.