The NeWMe corpus: a gold standard corpus for the study of word meaning negotiation

Abstract Word Meaning Negotiation (WMN) sequences occur when participants focus on clarifying or negotiating the meaning of a word or phrase, often prompted by questions or challenges. These interactions temporarily shift the conversation to explore nuances of meaning—sometimes resulting in quick clarification when due to insufficient understanding of word meaning, and other times leading to extended debates, such as disagreements on what a word can or should mean. This paper presents the largest, freely available manually annotated corpus of WMNs to date, encompassing spoken dyadic and multiparty conversations as well as online discussions. Our methodology combines searching for WMNs using regular expressions with a detailed annotation scheme that categorizes WMNs into types triggered by non-understanding (NONs: Non-understanding WMN) or disagreement (DINs: Disagreement WMN), and distinguishes between negotiations of situated and potential meanings. We also annotate incomplete negotiations and related phenomena, and analyze inter-annotator agreement to evaluate the reliability of the annotation schema. Preliminary investigations of WMNs in the corpus reveal distinct patterns in WMNs across contexts, with NONs prevalent in spoken interactions and DINs dominating online debates. This resource lays a foundation for studying semantic alignment, developing automated WMN detection, and creating adaptive dialogue systems. Our findings highlight the complexity of WMNs and provide practical insights for their identification and analysis.