Restructuring a Taxonomy of Literary Themes and Motifs for More Efficient Querying

In this paper we describe ongoing work in the restructuring of a tagset originally organised as a taxonomy and used to annotate literary themes and motifs in a corpus of classical works of poetry from a number of different traditions. We show how such a tagset can be rendered more efficient and useful through the appropriation of ideas and techniques from lexical semantics and ontology design. The newly redesigned tagset is described with examples showing how the new design is much more expressive than the old taxonomy; furthermore, an example query is described in order to demonstrate how more refined semantic searches can be carried using the new version of the taxonomy. The final result is, we hope, a resource that will be useful not only for the specific project for which it was developed but one that is well-designed and well-documented enough to be of use for other similar semantic annotation tasks.