What can linguistics contribute to event extraction

To appear In Robert Truswell (ed.) Handbook of Event Structure. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

A recurrent idea in linguistic theory is that predicates have complex syntactic representations that reflect their semantics. In the past twenty years or so linguistic theory has witnessed the return of lexical, or rather syntactic, decomposition approaches, which compose event structure from its meaning ingredients instantiated as distinct syntactic heads. These are essentially modernized versions of the proposals of Generative Semantics (McCawley 1968, Lakoff 1965), which answer many of the empirical objections to decomposition. This paper examines the decompositional project, concentrating on the various arguments presented in modern literature for a decompositional treatment of the relationship between pairs of verbs that differ roughly in that one of them has one more argument than the other. The paper shows that such pairs or alternations split into several types, only one of which deserves a decompositional analysis. Our litmus test for decomposition can be defined as follows: A meaning ingredient is a syntactic head, iff it is detectable by syntactic diagnostics.

The AAAI 2017 Spring Symposium on Computational Construction Grammar and Natural Language Understanding (AAAI Technical Report SS-17-02), 2017

Charles Fillmore developed both the theory of construction grammar and the theory of frame semantics. Fillmore's original frame semantic model included broad frames such as Commercial Transaction and Risk. FrameNet II (the current incarnation) has a complex lattice of frame-to-frame relations, in which the original frames are often abstract frames, and/or have been decomposed into distinct concrete frames. The frame-to-frame relations are of different types beyond simple taxonomic relations. The concrete frames are often more restricted in their argument structure construction possibilities than the original, more general frames. We argue that some frame-to-frame relations effectively represent the internal structure of the core events in the frame; the event structures are associated with different argument structure constructions. Introducing event structure into the frame semantic representation offers the potential to simplify the FrameNet lattice. Brief analyses of the Commercial Transaction and Risk frames are presented.

Data Analytics in Digital Humanities, 2017

In this chapter, we describe the conceptual tools that, in an NKRL context (NKRL = Narrative Knowledge Representation Language), allow us to obtain a (computer-usable) description of full “narratives” as logically structured associations of the constituting (and duly formalized) “elementary events.” Dealing with this problem means, in practice, being able to formalize those “connectivity phenomena”—denoted, at “surface level,” by logico-semantic coherence links like causality, goal, co-ordination, subordination, indirect speech, etc.—that assure the conceptual unity of a whole narrative. The second-order, unification based solutions adopted by NKRL in this context, “completive construction” and “binding occurrences,” allow us to take into account the connectivity phenomena by “reifying” the formal representations used to model the constitutive elementary events. These solutions, which are of interest from a general digital humanities point of view, are explained in some depth making use of several illustrating examples.

1997

ftp site: ftp.unive.it Contents p. 1 Abstract " 1 1. Introduction " 2 2. Interpreting Temporal Locations " 2 2.1 Conceptual Representations " 2 3. Aspect and the TD feature " 4 4. Quantifiers and Interpretation " 6 5. Global vs Internal: two features for event structure " 8 6. Factuality and the Structure of events " 11 7. Event structure and Quantification " 14 8. Quantifier Raising " 18 8.1 Uniqueness and Genericity " 21 9. The algorithm for temporal interpretation " 23 9.1 Tense and Aspect: two separate relations with Time Reference " 25 9.2 Implementing Allen's algorithm " 27 9.3 Semantic representations " 29 10. References " 31 11 Acknowledgements " 32

Predicative Forms in …

In this paper, we describe our general approach to computational lexical semantics, very brie y, focusing on the dynamics of semantics, and in particular of events. We i n vestigate what semantic information should be encoded in a lexicon entry so that i t c o n tributes best to the construction of a Text Meaning Representation (TMR) and to the generation of a text from the TMR. Within this approach, lexical items constitute the building blocks of the sentences of a text. We are interested in showing that static knowledge sources can bechanged dynamically, to t the linguistic context, at processing time if we h a ve t h e mechanisms to enable such changes. Moreover, our experience shows that determining the meaning of lexical items is not a trivial task in lexicon acquisition, and as humans still play a crucial role in lexicon acquisition, this problem must beaddressed head on. We show that it is possible to reconcile the subjectivity o f a c q uirers with the recognition of the \core" meaning of a word, if we develop a theory of computational (lexical) semantics which c a n account for some of the combinatory and productive principles of natural languages. 2 EVELYNE VIEGAS, KAVI MAHESH, SERGEI NIRENBURG tude to the static knowledge bases (the lexicon, the ontology, the grammar, the special \microtheory" rules) is almost strictly functional: the knowledge which i s a cquired is, from the outset, intended for use to help extract and represent m e a n i ng given a text or realizing a text given its meaning.

International Journal of Speech Technology, 2008

In this paper we will focus on the notion of "implicit" or lexically unexpressed linguistic elements that are nonetheless necessary for a complete semantic interpretation of a text. We referred to "entities" and "events" because the recovery of the implicit material may affect all the modules of a system for semantic processing, from the grammatically guided components to the inferential and reasoning ones. Reference to the system GETARUNS offers one possible implementation of the algorithms and procedures needed to cope with the problem and allows to deal with all the spectrum of phenomena. The paper will address at first the following three types of "implicit" entities and events: -the grammatical ones, as suggested by a linguistic theories like LFG or similar generative theories; -the semantic ones suggested in the FrameNet project, i.e. CNI, DNI, INI; -the pragmatic ones: here we will present a theory and an implementation for the recovery of implicit entities and events of (non-) standard implicatures. In particular we will show how the use of commonsense knowledge may fruitfully contribute in finding relevant implied meanings. Last Implicit Entity only touched on, though for lack of space, by the paper is the Subject of Point of View, which is computed by Semantic Informational Structure and contributes the intended entity from whose point of view is expressed a given subjective statement.

Meaning and Grammar of Nouns and Verbs, 2021

IntroductionI t is a well-known fact that the vocabularies of individual languages are structured very di erently. Even if it is always possible to translate a certain utterance from one language into another, it is rarely, if ever, possible to say that all or even some lexemes making up an utterance in one language correspond perfectly and completely to the lexemes rendering that utterance in another. In most cases the content cut out from the amorphous mass of notions and ideas by one lexeme A may be similar to the content identi ed by some translational counterpart in another, but there is hardly ever complete identity and what we nd is partial overlap at best. The consequence of this basic observation for structuralists was that semantic analysis in one language amounts to describing the structural relations between the lexemes of a language in terms of oppositions (antonymy, complementarity, converseness, etc.), super-and subordination, meronymy, etc. (cf. Lyons 1972, Cruse 1986, Löbner 2002, etc.), and that comparative semantics or comparative lexicology is nothing more than a comparison between these networks of structural relations. More recent theorizing about semantics, speci cally the idea of semantic decomposition in terms of hierarchical structures ("decompositional event seman-In the publications of Sebastian Löbner, to whom we dedicate this article on the occasion of his 65th birthday, comparative studies on lexicology and meaning have played a considerable role (see for instance Löbner 2002: 153,. or Löbner 2011). We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and valuable suggestions.

Events as grammatical objects, 2000

Husserl Studies, 2017