---
title: "Building a reference lexicon for countability in — Kiss 2014"
description: "The paper builds a lexicon that gives the count-mass class of about 14,000 English nouns, one entry per noun-sense pair. Each noun-sense pair is answered…"
authors: ["Tibor Kiss", "Francis Jeffry Pelletier", "Tobias Stadtfeld"]
year: 2014
venue: "Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/L14-1312/"
doi: "10.63317/2uw4887z6mj3"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lingbulk-2014-kiss-building-reference-lexicon-countability-english/"
---
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# Building a reference lexicon for countability in English

**Authors:** [Tibor Kiss](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/tibor-kiss/), Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Tobias Stadtfeld · **Year:** 2014 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L14-1312](https://aclanthology.org/L14-1312/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) (LREC proceedings) — summary only

[**10** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2250951601) OpenAlex · 2026-10-14 · [**1** citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lingbulk-2014-kiss-building-reference-lexicon-countability-english/cited-by/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L14-1/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L14-1312/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L14-1312.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/2uw4887z6mj3](https://doi.org/10.63317/2uw4887z6mj3)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2250951601)

**Authors (3)**

1. [Tibor Kiss](https://openalex.org/A5080795652) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1857-3686) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/144372201) · h 12 · 1139 citations · 64 works
2. [Francis Jeffry Pelletier](https://openalex.org/A5006576404) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3399-2718) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1760616) · h 31 · 4625 citations · 186 works
3. [Tobias Stadtfeld](https://openalex.org/A5082349968) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2669493) · h 5 · 50 citations · 13 works

Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper builds a lexicon that gives the count-mass class of about 14,000 English nouns, one entry per noun-sense pair. Each noun-sense pair is answered in a questionnaire of six questions about its use, and the answers assign a fine-grained class between count and mass. The starting nouns and senses come from the Open ANC and WordNet. The reference lexicon holds 13,804 noun-sense pairs: 1,000 were annotated by four speakers, and the rest by two annotators each. Krippendorff's alpha is between 0.694 and 0.755. The lexicon shows a middle group of dual-life nouns, which act as mass and as count, and object-mass senses are very rare (0.58% of the total).

## Ideas

- I1. Add a countability column (count, mass, dual) to the rows of `data/lemmas.tsv` and use it in `en/src/expert.rs` to check the determiner: "a car" and "much water" should agree with the class. Measure: rule accuracy on EWT test determiner-noun pairs, with and without the column.
- I2. Run the six questions as deterministic probes over the Mova raw collection, counting "a N", "much N" and plural forms, and report the probe result next to the class. Measure: agreement with the paper's class on a held-out sample. The gold data are NC, so this is a test only.
- I3. Flag dual-life nouns in `prag`/`world` as an ambiguity, so that the reading is given with its reason and not decided silently. Measure: the share of EWT sentences where the flag changes a determiner check.

## For Mova

The chapters are [languages/en/10-word-classes.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/10-word-classes/) and [languages/en/11-nouns.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/11-nouns/). The code is `en/src/lexgen.rs` and `data/lemmas.tsv` (the new column), and `en/src/expert.rs` (the check). The lexicon is LREC NC: its entries are a test resource only, and the countability column must be made from Mova's own probes.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/2uw4887z6mj3](https://doi.org/10.63317/2uw4887z6mj3)

```bibtex
@inproceedings{kiss2014building,
  title = {{Building a reference lexicon for countability in English}},
  author = {Kiss, Tibor and Pelletier, Francis Jeffry and Stadtfeld, Tobias},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.63317/2uw4887z6mj3},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2uw4887z6mj3}
}
```

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## References

22 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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