Death and Lightness: Using a Demographic Model to Find Support Verbs

Some verbs have a particular kind of binary ambiguity: they can carry their normal, full meaning, or they can be merely acting as a prop for the nominal object. It has been suggested that there is a detectable pattern in the relationship between a verb acting as a prop (a \term{support verb}) and the noun it supports. The task this paper undertakes is to develop a model which identifies the support verb for a particular noun, and by extension, when nouns are enumerated, a model which disambiguates a verb with respect to its support status. The paper sets up a basic model as a standard for comparison; it then proposes a more complex model, and gives some results to support the model's validity, comparing it with other similar approaches.Comment: LaTeX, 8 pages, uses aclap.st

Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation

These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge". QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)

Multiword expressions at length and in depth

The annual workshop on multiword expressions takes place since 2001 in conjunction with major computational linguistics conferences and attracts the attention of an ever-growing community working on a variety of languages, linguistic phenomena and related computational processing issues. MWE 2017 took place in Valencia, Spain, and represented a vibrant panorama of the current research landscape on the computational treatment of multiword expressions, featuring many high-quality submissions. Furthermore, MWE 2017 included the first shared task on multilingual identification of verbal multiword expressions. The shared task, with extended communal work, has developed important multilingual resources and mobilised several research groups in computational linguistics worldwide. This book contains extended versions of selected papers from the workshop. Authors worked hard to include detailed explanations, broader and deeper analyses, and new exciting results, which were thoroughly reviewed by an internationally renowned committee. We hope that this distinctly joint effort will provide a meaningful and useful snapshot of the multilingual state of the art in multiword expressions modelling and processing, and will be a point point of reference for future work

Extra argumentality - affectees, landmarks, and voice

This article investigates sentences with additional core arguments of a special type in three languages, viz. German, English, and Mandarin. These additional arguments, called extra arguments in the article, form a crosslinguistically homogeneous class by virtue of their structural and semantic similarities, with so-called "raised possessors" forming just a sub-group among them. Structurally, extra arguments may not be the most deeply embedded arguments in a sentence. Semantically, their referents are felt to stand in a specific relation to the referent of the/a more deeply embedded argument. There are two major thematic relations that are instantiated by extra arguments, viz. affectees and landmarks. These thematic role notions are justified in the context of and partly in contrast to, Dowty's (1991) proto-role approach. An affectee combines proto-agent with proto-patient properties in eventualities that are construed as involving causation. A landmark is a ground with respect to some spatial configuration denoted by the predication at hand, but a figure at the highest level of gestalt partitioning that is relevant in a clause. Thereby, both affectees and landmarks are inherently hybrid categories. The account of extra argumentality is couched in a neo-Davidsonian event semantics in the spirit of Kratzer (1996, 2003), and voice heads are assumed to introduce affectee arguments and landmark arguments right above VP

Multiword expression processing: A survey

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a class of linguistic forms spanning conventional word boundaries that are both idiosyncratic and pervasive across different languages. The structure of linguistic processing that depends on the clear distinction between words and phrases has to be re-thought to accommodate MWEs. The issue of MWE handling is crucial for NLP applications, where it raises a number of challenges. The emergence of solutions in the absence of guiding principles motivates this survey, whose aim is not only to provide a focused review of MWE processing, but also to clarify the nature of interactions between MWE processing and downstream applications. We propose a conceptual framework within which challenges and research contributions can be positioned. It offers a shared understanding of what is meant by "MWE processing," distinguishing the subtasks of MWE discovery and identification. It also elucidates the interactions between MWE processing and two use cases: Parsing and machine translation. Many of the approaches in the literature can be differentiated according to how MWE processing is timed with respect to underlying use cases. We discuss how such orchestration choices affect the scope of MWE-aware systems. For each of the two MWE processing subtasks and for each of the two use cases, we conclude on open issues and research perspectives

Alternating ditransitives in English: a corpus-based study

This thesis is a large-scale investigation of ditransitive constructions and their alternants in English. Typically both constructions involve three participants: participant A transfers an element B to participant C. A speaker can linguistically encode this type of situation in one of two ways: by using either a double object construction or a prepositional paraphrase. This study examines this syntactic choice in the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), a fully tagged and parsed corpus incorporating both spoken and written English. After a general introduction, chapter 2 reviews the different grammatical treatments of the constructions. Chapter 3 discusses whether indirect objects have to be considered necessary complements or optional adjuncts of the verb. I then examine the tension between rigid classification and authentic (corpus) data in order to demonstrate that the distinction between complements and adjuncts evidences gradient categorisation effects. This study has both a linguistic and a methodological angle. The overall design and methodology employed in this study are discussed in chapter 4. The thesis considers a number of variables that help predict the occurrence of each pattern. The evaluation of the variables, the determination of their significance, and the measurement of their contribution to the model involve reliance on statistical methods (but not statistical software packages). Chapters 5, 6, and 7 review pragmatic factors claimed to influence a speaker’s choice of construction, among them the information status and the syntactic ‘heaviness’ of the constituents involved. The explanatory power and coverage of these factors are experimentally tested independently against the corpus data, in order to highlight several features which only emerge after examining authentic sources. Chapter 8 posits a novel method of bringing these factors together; the resulting model predicts the dative alternation with almost 80% accuracy in ICE-GB. Conclusions are offered in chapter 9