Problems of methodology and explanation in word order universals research

Ever since the publication of Greenberg 1963, word order typologists have attempted to formulate and refine implicational universals of word order so as to characterize the restricted distribution of certain word order patterns, and in some cases have also attempted to develop general principles to explain the existence of those universals

Questions on transitivity

This handout (it isn’t a paper) presents phenomena and questions, rather than conclusions, related to the concept of transitivity. The idea is to return to these questions at the end of the Workshop to see if we can have a clearer consensus about the best general analysis of phenomena associated with transitivity. Section 2 presents alternative analyses of transitivity and questions about transitivity in three languages I have worked on. Section 3 discusses a few of the different conceptualisations of transitivity that might be relevant to our thinking about the questions related to these languages or that bring up further questions. Section 4 presents some general questions that might be asked of individual languages

Distributional Measures of Semantic Distance: A Survey

The ability to mimic human notions of semantic distance has widespread applications. Some measures rely only on raw text (distributional measures) and some rely on knowledge sources such as WordNet. Although extensive studies have been performed to compare WordNet-based measures with human judgment, the use of distributional measures as proxies to estimate semantic distance has received little attention. Even though they have traditionally performed poorly when compared to WordNet-based measures, they lay claim to certain uniquely attractive features, such as their applicability in resource-poor languages and their ability to mimic both semantic similarity and semantic relatedness. Therefore, this paper presents a detailed study of distributional measures. Particular attention is paid to flesh out the strengths and limitations of both WordNet-based and distributional measures, and how distributional measures of distance can be brought more in line with human notions of semantic distance. We conclude with a brief discussion of recent work on hybrid measures

What's in a compound? Review article on Lieber and Štekauer (eds) 2009. 'The Oxford Handbook of Compounding'

The Oxford Handbook of Compounding surveys a variety of theoretical and descriptive issues, presenting overviews of compounding in a number of frameworks and sketches of compounding in a number of languages. Much of the book deals with Germanic noun–noun compounding. I take up some of the theoretical questions raised surrounding such constructions, in particular, the notion of attributive modification in noun-headed compounds. I focus on two issues. The first is the semantic relation between the head noun and its nominal modifier. Several authors repeat the argument that there is a small(-ish) fixed number of general semantic relations in noun–noun compounds (‘Lees's solution’), but I argue that the correct way to look at such compounds is what I call ‘Downing's solution’, in which we assume that the relation is specified pragmatically, and hence could be any relation at all. The second issue is the way that adjectives modify nouns inside compounds. Although there are languages in which compounded adjectives modify just as they do in phrases (Chukchee, Arleplog Swedish), in general the adjective has a classifier role and not that of a compositional attributive modifier. Thus, even if an English (or German) adjective–noun compound looks compositional, it isn't

Crowdsourcing Question-Answer Meaning Representations

We introduce Question-Answer Meaning Representations (QAMRs), which represent the predicate-argument structure of a sentence as a set of question-answer pairs. We also develop a crowdsourcing scheme to show that QAMRs can be labeled with very little training, and gather a dataset with over 5,000 sentences and 100,000 questions. A detailed qualitative analysis demonstrates that the crowd-generated question-answer pairs cover the vast majority of predicate-argument relationships in existing datasets (including PropBank, NomBank, QA-SRL, and AMR) along with many previously under-resourced ones, including implicit arguments and relations. The QAMR data and annotation code is made publicly available to enable future work on how best to model these complex phenomena.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 2 table