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Title
Abstract
Introduction
The Case for Tense and Aspect Semantics in Amr
Annotation Procedure
Conclusions and Future Work
References
All Topics
Computer Science
Computational Linguistics

Annotation of Tense and Aspect Semantics for Sentential AMR

Profile image of Lucia DonatelliLucia Donatelli

2018, Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018)

Abstract

Although English grammar encodes a number of semantic contrasts with tense and aspect marking, these semantics are currently ignored by Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) annotations. This paper extends sentence-level AMR to include a coarse-grained treatment of tense and aspect semantics. The proposed framework augments the representation of finite predications to include a four-way temporal distinction (event time before, up to, at, or after speech time) and several aspectual distinctions (including static vs. dynamic, habitual vs. episodic, and telic vs. atelic). This will enable AMR to be used for NLP tasks and applications that require sophisticated reasoning about time and event structure.

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1989

In this paper a model for temporal references in natural language (NL) is studied and a Prolog implementation of it is presented. This model is intended to be a common framework for semantic analysis of verb tenses and temporal adverbial phrases. The time model choosen was based on time intervals and temporal relations.

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Picking reference events from tense trees
Lenhart Schubert

Proceedings of the workshop on Speech and Natural Language - HLT '90, 1990

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In this paper, we propose an annotation scheme for the manual annotation of tense and aspect in natural language corpora, as well as an implementation using GraphAnno, a configurable tool for manual multi- level annotation. The annotation scheme is based on Klein’s (1994) theory of tense and aspect, arguably the most widely accepted theory in this domain (cf. also Klein and Li 2009). One of the most important features of Klein’s theory is that in addition to the time span during which a situation obtains (the ‘time of situation’/TSit), it makes use of the concept of ‘Topic Time’ (TT), which is related to, but different from, Reichenbach’s (1947) reference point ‘R’ (cf. Derczynski and Gaizauskas 2013). Given that the resulting annotations cannot be mapped one-to-one to words or constituents, and as they are partially retrieved from the context, a semantic layer of annotation is needed, in addition to the structural one. The multi-level approach advocated here also allows us to annotate temporal relations across sentences. Section 2 provides some background on GraphAnno. Some ontological prerequisites of the anno- tation of tense and aspect are established in Section 3, and the concept of ‘Topic Time’ is introduced. Sections 4 and 5 demonstrate the annotation of temporal relations within and beyond the sentence, re- spectively. Section 6 describes the query language of GraphAnno, and Section 7 contains an outlook.

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Related topics

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Tense and Aspect Systems
  • Tense aspect modality
  • Semantic Annotation
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