A general framework for the annotation of causality based on FrameNet

International audienceWe present here a general set of semantic frames to annotate causal expressions, with a rich lexicon in French and an annotated corpus of about 4000 instances of causal lexical items with their corresponding semantic frames. The aim of our project is to have both the largest possible coverage of causal phenomena in French, across all parts of speech, and have it linked to a general semantic framework such as FN, to benefit in particular from the relations between other semantic frames, e.g., temporal ones or intentional ones, and the underlying upper lexical ontology that enables some forms of reasoning. This is part of the larger ASFALDA French FrameNet project, which focuses on a few different notional domains which are interesting in their own right (Djemaa et al., 2016), including cognitive positions and communication frames. In the process of building the French lexicon and preparing the annotation of the corpus, we had to remodel some of the frames proposed in FN based on English data, with hopefully more precise frame definitions to facilitate human annotation. This includes semantic clarifications of frames and frame elements, redundancy elimination, and added coverage. The result is arguably a significant improvement of the treatment of causality in FN itself

Unsupervised extraction of semantic relations using discourse cues

International audienceThis paper presents a knowledge base containing triples involving pairs of verbs associated with semantic or discourse relations. The relations in these triples are marked by discourse connectors between two adjacent instances of the verbs in the triple in the large French corpus, frWaC. We detail several measures that evaluate the relevance of the triples and the strength of their association. We use manual annotations to evaluate our method, and also study the coverage of our resource with respect to the discourse annotated corpus Annodis. Our positive results show the potential impact of our resource for discourse analysis tasks as well as other semantically oriented tasks like temporal and causal information extractio

Extraction non supervisée de relations sémantiques lexicales

International audienceNous présentons une base de connaissances comportant des triplets de paires de verbes associés avec une relation sémantique/discursive, extraits du corpus français frWaC par une méthode s’appuyant sur la présence d’unconnecteur discursif reliant deux verbes. Nous détaillons plusieurs mesures visant à évaluer la pertinence des triplets et la force d’association entre la relation sémantique/discursive et la paire de verbes. L’évaluation intrinsèque est réalisée par rapport à des annotations manuelles. Une évaluation de la couverture de la ressource est également réalisée par rapport au corpus Annodis annoté discursivement. Cette étude produit des résultats prometteurs démontrant l’utilité potentielle de notre ressource pour les tâches d’analyse discursive mais aussi des tâches de nature sémantique

From Parsed Corpora to Semantically Related Verbs

A comprehensive repository of semantic relations between verbs is of great importance in supporting a large area of natural language applications. The aim of this paper is to automatically generate a repository of semantic relations between verb pairs using Distributional Memory (DM), a state-of-the-art framework for distributional semantics. The main idea of our method is to exploit relationships that are expressed through prepositions between a verbal and a nominal event in text to extract semantically related events. Then using these prepositions, we derive relation types including causal, temporal, comparison, and expansion. The result of our study leads to the construction of a resource for semantic relations, which consists of pairs of verbs associated with their probable arguments and significance scores based on our measures. Experimental evaluations show promising results on the task of extracting and categorising semantic relations between verbs