Development of an Annotation Schema for the Identification of Semantic Uncertainty in DIN Standards

This paper presents the results of a pilot study carried out in cooperation between Linguistics and Mechanical Engineering, funded by the collaborative research centre (CRC) 805 “Beherrschung von Unsicherheit in lasttragenden Systemen des Maschinenbaus”. Our goal is to help improve norm compliant product development and engineering design by focusing on ambiguous language use in norm texts (= “semantic uncertainty”). Depending on the country and product under development, industry standards may be legally binding. Thus, standards play a vital role in reducing uncertainty for manufacturers and engineers by providing requirements for product development and engineering design. However, uncertainty is introduced by the standards themselves in various forms, the most notable of which are the use of underspecified concepts, modal verbs like should, and references to texts which contain semantically uncertain parts. If conformity to standards is to be ensured, the person using the standards must interpret them and document the interpretation. In order to support users in these tasks, we 1. developed an annotation schema which allows the identification and classification of semantically uncertain segments of standards, 2. used the schema to create a taxonomy of semantic uncertainty in standards, 3. developed a proof-of-concept information system.