Journal ArticleDOI
Thematic proto-roles and argument selection
TLDR
The authors argued that the best theory for describing this domain is not a traditional system of discrete roles (Agent, Patient, Source, etc.) but a theory in which the only roles are two cluster-concepts called PROTO-AGENT and PROTO -PATIENT, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments: an argument of a verb may bear either of the two proto-roles (or both) to varying degrees, according to the number of entailments of each kind the verb gives it.Abstract:
As a novel attack on the perennially vexing questions of the theoretical status of thematic roles and the inventory of possible roles, this paper defends a strategy of basing accounts of roles on more unified domains of linguistic data than have been used in the past to motivate roles, addressing in particular the problem of ARGUMENT SELECTION (principles determining which roles are associated with which grammatical relations). It is concluded that the best theory for describing this domain is not a traditional system of discrete roles (Agent, Patient, Source, etc.) but a theory in which the only roles are two cluster-concepts called PROTO-AGENT and PROTO-PATIENT, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments: an argument of a verb may bear either of the two proto-roles (or both) to varying degrees, according to the number of entailments of each kind the verb gives it. Both fine-grained and coarse-grained classes of verbal arguments (corresponding to traditional thematic roles and other classes as well) follow automatically, as do desired 'role hierarchies'. By examining occurrences of the 'same' verb with different argument configurations—e.g. two forms of psych predicates and object-oblique alternations as in the familiar spray/load class—it can also be argued that proto-roles act as defaults in the learning of lexical meanings. Are proto-role categories manifested elsewhere in language or as cognitive categories? If so, they might be a means of making grammar acquisition easier for the child, they might explain certain other typological and acquisitional observations, and they may lead to an account of contrasts between unaccusative and unergative intransitive verbs that does not rely on deriving unaccusatives from underlying direct objects.read more
Citations
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Proceedings ArticleDOI
Verb semantics and lexical selection
Zhibiao Wu,Martha Palmer +1 more
Abstract: This paper will focus on the semantic representation of verbs in computer systems and its impact on lexical selection problems in machine translation (MT). Two groups of English and Chinese verbs are examined to show that lexical selection must be based on interpretation of the sentences as well as selection restrictions placed on the verb arguments. A novel representation scheme is suggested, and is compared to representations with selection restrictions used in transfer-based MT. We see our approach as closely aligned with knowledge-based MT approaches (KBMT), and as a separate component that could be incorporated into existing systems. Examples and experimental results will show that, using this scheme, inexact matches can achieve correct lexical selection.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Proposition Bank: An Annotated Corpus of Semantic Roles
TL;DR: An automatic system for semantic role tagging trained on the corpus is described and the effect on its performance of various types of information is discussed, including a comparison of full syntactic parsing with a flat representation and the contribution of the empty trace categories of the treebank.
Journal ArticleDOI
The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution
TL;DR: Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available.
Journal ArticleDOI
Automatic labeling of semantic roles
Daniel Gildea,Dan Jurafsky +1 more
TL;DR: A system for identifying the semantic relationships, or semantic roles, filled by constituents of a sentence within a semantic frame, based on statistical classifiers trained on roughly 50,000 sentences that were hand-annotated with semantic roles by the FrameNet semantic labeling project.
Book ChapterDOI
Severing the External Argument from its Verb
TL;DR: In this paper, Davidson drew a clear distinction between arguments and adjuncts, and pointed out that ignoring temporal relations, sentences like "We bought your slippers in Marrakesh" ignore temporal relations.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
Ann S. Ferebee,Noam Chomsky +1 more
TL;DR: Methodological preliminaries of generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence; theory of performance; organization of a generative grammar; justification of grammar; descriptive and explanatory theories; evaluation procedures; linguistic theory and language learning.
Book
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
TL;DR: Generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence as discussed by the authors have been used as a theory of performance for language learning. But they have not yet been applied to the problem of language modeling.
Journal ArticleDOI
Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories
Eleanor Rosch,Carolyn B. Mervis +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explored the hypothesis that the members of categories which are considered most prototypical are those with most attributes in common with other members of the category and least attributes with other categories and found that family resemblance offers an alternative to criterial features in defining categories.
Book
Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar
TL;DR: This book investigates a wide variety of semantic rules, stating them in considerable detail and extensively treating their consequences for the syntactic component of the grammar, and proposes radically new approaches to the so-called Crossover Principle, the control problem for complement subjects, parentheticals, and the interpretation of nonspecific noun phrases.