Thesaurus with Predicate-Argument Structure to Provide Base Framework to Determine States, Actions, and Change-of-States

Language Resource ◽

High Possibility

The goal with this chapter is to discuss the possibility of language resources in determining the states, actions, and change-of-states of characters in narratives. An overview of previous work on linguistic theory and language resources is given then the Predicate-Argument Structure Thesaurus (PT), a Japanese language resource constructed based on the extended framework of the Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS), is proposed. The PT provides hierarchical clusters of synonyms for 11,900 predicates and 22,000 example sentences annotated with semantic role labels. Each concept has an abstracted LCS, and example sentences are attached to each concept. By virtue of the structure, a correlation of the arguments between other clusters can be determined. The semantic structure of the PT is investigated to enrich generated texts of narratives, and the high possibility of lexical semantics contributing to narrative processing is revealed.

Predicate Argument Structure in Haitian Creole

Revue québécoise de linguistique ◽

10.7202/602655ar ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 95-129 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Diane Massam

Keyword(s):

Argument Structure ◽

Conceptual Structure ◽

Future Research ◽

Theoretical Terms ◽

Haitian Creole ◽

Ditransitive Verbs ◽

The Many ◽

AbstractThis paper outlines the argument properties of Haitian Creole verbs, including intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs, within a lexical framework which includes a level of Lexical Conceptual Structure and a level of Predicate Argument Structure. There is assumed to be a relatively free mapping relation between these two levels in order to explain the many possible variations in argument structure that most verbs exhibit. We see that there are at least two detransitivizing operations in Haitian Creole: one which operates freely and one which must be adverb-licensed. Transitive and ditransitive verbs are classified in terms of which of these operations they may undergo. The paper presents a description of Haitian Creole verb-types in Government and Binding theoretical terms and highlights several problems which Haitian Creole poses for future research.

Co-Indexation in Predicate Argument Structure: The Characteristics of Quechua Ku

Revue québécoise de linguistique ◽

10.7202/602688ar ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 79-97

Author(s):

Simon Van de Kerke

Keyword(s):

Argument Structure ◽

Conceptual Structure ◽

Internal Argument ◽

External Position ◽

Theta Role ◽

AbstractThe aim of this article is to give an account of the characteristics of the Quechua verbal affixku. It addresses the question of whether constructions that are reputed to be cases of syntactic NP-movement in other languages can be analyzed in the same way in Quechua. It is claimed that Quechua does not allow the external position to remain without a theta-role in Predicate Argument Structure, in that way excluding syntactic NP-movement. The effect ofkucan be described as: co-index an internal argument with the external position in the mapping from Lexical Conceptual Structure to Predicate Argument Structure. In that way the projection of verbs, that in other languages subcategorize for an empty external position, is licensed.

Neural Unsupervised Semantic Role Labeling

ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing ◽

10.1145/3461613 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 20 (6) ◽

pp. 1-16

Author(s):

Kashif Munir ◽

Hai Zhao ◽

Zuchao Li

Keyword(s):

Argument Structure ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Neural Model ◽

Semantic Structure ◽

Semantic Role ◽

Semantic Role Labeling ◽

Neural Models ◽

Previous State ◽

Dependency Relations ◽

The task of semantic role labeling ( SRL ) is dedicated to finding the predicate-argument structure. Previous works on SRL are mostly supervised and do not consider the difficulty in labeling each example which can be very expensive and time-consuming. In this article, we present the first neural unsupervised model for SRL. To decompose the task as two argument related subtasks, identification and clustering, we propose a pipeline that correspondingly consists of two neural modules. First, we train a neural model on two syntax-aware statistically developed rules. The neural model gets the relevance signal for each token in a sentence, to feed into a BiLSTM, and then an adversarial layer for noise-adding and classifying simultaneously, thus enabling the model to learn the semantic structure of a sentence. Then we propose another neural model for argument role clustering, which is done through clustering the learned argument embeddings biased toward their dependency relations. Experiments on the CoNLL-2009 English dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art baseline in terms of non-neural models for argument identification and classification.

Codeswitching as Projection of Bilingual Lemmas in Contact

Studies in Linguistics and Literature ◽

10.22158/sll.v4n1p40 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. p40

Author(s):

Longxing Wei

Keyword(s):

Argument Structure ◽

Mental Lexicon ◽

Conceptual Structure ◽

Activation Model ◽

Naturally Occurring ◽

Pragmatic Information ◽

Lexical Structure ◽

Surface Realization

Unlike most previous studies of Codeswitching (CS) focused on describing surface configurations of switched items (i.e., where CS is structurally possible) or the switched items (i.e., what items from another language can be switched), this paper explores formulation processes of bilingual speech and the nature of the bilingual mental lexicon and its activity in CS. More specifically, it applies the Bilingual Lemma Activation Model (Wei, 2002, 2006b) to the data drawn from various naturally occurring CS instances. It claims that the mental lexicon does not simply contain lexemes and their meanings, but also lemmas, which are abstract entries in the mental lexicon that support the surface realization of actual lexemes. Lemmas are abstract in that they contain phonological, morphological, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic information about lexemes. It further claims that lemmas in the bilingual mental lexicon are language-specific and are in contact during a discourse involving CS at three levels of abstract lexical structure: lexical-conceptual structure, predicate-argument structure, and morphological realization patterns. The CS instances described and analyzed in this paper provide evidence that the bilingual speaker’s two linguistic systems are unequally activated in CS, and CS is an outcome of bilingual lemmas in contact.

Composite Abstract Lexical Structure in Interlanguage Production

Studies in Linguistics and Literature ◽

10.22158/sll.v5n1p81 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. p81

Author(s):

Xuexin Liu ◽

Longxing Wei

Keyword(s):

Argument Structure ◽

Mental Lexicon ◽

Conceptual Structure ◽

Target Language ◽

Conceptual Approach ◽

Lexical Structure ◽

Abstract Level ◽

Japanese English

Most previous studies of difficulties in learning a second/foreign language focused on sources of learner errors caused by cross-linguistic differences in various levels of linguistic structure, but most of such studies remain at a rather superficial level of description. This study explores sources of learning difficulties at an abstract level by studying the nature and activity of the bilingual mental lexicon during interlanguage production. The bilingual mental lexicon is defined as the mental lexicon containing abstract entries called cross-linguistic “lemmas” underlying particular lexeme. This study claims that it is language-specific lemma which drives interlanguage production at three levels of abstract lexical structure: lexical-conceptual structure, predicate-argument structure, and morphological realization patterns. It further claims that it is cross-linguistic lemma variations in abstract lexical-conceptual structure which result in not only inappropriate lexical choices but also errors in interlanguage production of target language predicate-argument structure and morphological realization. Naturally occurring interlanguage production date for the study include several native and target language pairs: Japanese-English, Chinese-English, and English-Japanese. Some typical instances of language transfer involving other language pairs are also cited in support of the argument that the lexical-conceptual approach to interlanguage production is fundamental in any study of the nature of learner errors in interlanguage development.

Syntax Role for Neural Semantic Role Labeling

Computational Linguistics ◽

10.1162/coli_a_00408 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-48

Author(s):

Zuchao Li ◽

Hai Zhao ◽

Shexia He ◽

Jiaxun Cai

Keyword(s):

Argument Structure ◽

Large Scale ◽

Language Models ◽

Semantic Role ◽

Semantic Role Labeling ◽

Empirical Survey ◽

Learning Framework ◽

Syntactic Information ◽

Feature Based ◽

Abstract Semantic role labeling (SRL) is dedicated to recognizing the semantic predicate-argument structure of a sentence. Previous studies in terms of traditional models have shown syntactic information can make remarkable contributions to SRL performance; however, the necessity of syntactic information was challenged by a few recent neural SRL studies that demonstrate impressive performance without syntactic backbones and suggest that syntax information becomes much less important for neural semantic role labeling, especially when paired with recent deep neural network and large-scale pre-trained language models. Despite this notion, the neural SRL field still lacks a systematic and full investigation on the relevance of syntactic information in SRL, for both dependency and both monolingual and multilingual settings. This paper intends to quantify the importance of syntactic information for neural SRL in the deep learning framework. We introduce three typical SRL frameworks (baselines), sequence-based, tree-based, and graph-based, which are accompanied by two categories of exploiting syntactic information: syntax pruningbased and syntax feature-based. Experiments are conducted on the CoNLL-2005, 2009, and 2012 benchmarks for all languages available, and results show that neural SRL models can still benefit from syntactic information under certain conditions. Furthermore, we show the quantitative significance of syntax to neural SRL models together with a thorough empirical survey using existing models.

Labeling Chinese Predicates with Semantic Roles

Computational Linguistics ◽

10.1162/coli.2008.34.2.225 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 34 (2) ◽

pp. 225-255 ◽

Cited By ~ 48

Author(s):

Nianwen Xue

Keyword(s):

Gold Standard ◽

Argument Structure ◽

High Performance ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Semantic Role ◽

Semantic Role Labeling ◽

Pos Tagging ◽

Fully Automatic ◽

Syntactic Annotation ◽

In this article we report work on Chinese semantic role labeling, taking advantage of two recently completed corpora, the Chinese PropBank, a semantically annotated corpus of Chinese verbs, and the Chinese Nombank, a companion corpus that annotates the predicate-argument structure of nominalized predicates. Because the semantic role labels are assigned to the constituents in a parse tree, we first report experiments in which semantic role labels are automatically assigned to hand-crafted parses in the Chinese Treebank. This gives us a measure of the extent to which semantic role labels can be bootstrapped from the syntactic annotation provided in the treebank. We then report experiments using automatic parses with decreasing levels of human annotation in the input to the syntactic parser: parses that use gold-standard segmentation and POS-tagging, parses that use only gold-standard segmentation, and fully automatic parses. These experiments gauge how successful semantic role labeling for Chinese can be in more realistic situations. Our results show that when hand-crafted parses are used, semantic role labeling accuracy for Chinese is comparable to what has been reported for the state-of-the-art English semantic role labeling systems trained and tested on the English PropBank, even though the Chinese PropBank is significantly smaller in size. When an automatic parser is used, however, the accuracy of our system is significantly lower than the English state of the art. This indicates that an improvement in Chinese parsing is critical to high-performance semantic role labeling for Chinese.

Adding semantic roles to the Chinese Treebank

Natural Language Engineering ◽

10.1017/s1351324908004865 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 143-172 ◽

Cited By ~ 22

Author(s):

NIANWEN XUE ◽

MARTHA PALMER

Keyword(s):

Argument Structure ◽

Syntactic Structure ◽

Parse Tree ◽

Semantic Role ◽

Lexical Database ◽

Semantic Roles ◽

Structure Annotation ◽

Event Result

AbstractWe report work on adding semantic role labels to the Chinese Treebank, a corpus already annotated with phrase structures. The work involves locating all verbs and their nominalizations in the corpus, and semi-automatically adding semantic role labels to their arguments, which are constituents in a parse tree. Although the same procedure is followed, different issues arise in the annotation of verbs and nominalized predicates. For verbs, identifying their arguments is generally straightforward given their syntactic structure in the Chinese Treebank as they tend to occupy well-defined syntactic positions. Our discussion focuses on the syntactic variations in the realization of the arguments as well as our approach to annotating dislocated and discontinuous arguments. In comparison, identifying the arguments for nominalized predicates is more challenging and we discuss criteria and procedures for distinguishing arguments from non-arguments. In particular we focus on the role of support verbs as well as the relevance of event/result distinctions in the annotation of the predicate-argument structure of nominalized predicates. We also present our approach to taking advantage of the syntactic structure in the Chinese Treebank to bootstrap the predicate-argument structure annotation of verbs. Finally, we discuss the creation of a lexical database of frame files and its role in guiding predicate-argument annotation. Procedures for ensuring annotation consistency and inter-annotator agreement evaluation results are also presented.

Portuguese converted deverbal nouns: Constraints on their bases

WORD Structure ◽

10.3366/e1750124509000300 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

pp. 69-107

Author(s):

Alexandra Soares Rodrigues

Keyword(s):

Argument Structure ◽

Conceptual Structure ◽

Word Formation ◽

Lexical Item ◽

Structural Constraints ◽

Lexical Semantic ◽

The Third ◽

The Relationship

The aim of this paper is to analyse the constraints that govern the formation of Portuguese converted deverbal nouns (‘CDNs’). To this end, we have analysed a total of 1323 converted deverbal nouns. The first type of constraints investigated are those found at the prosodic level: these deal with the configurational formatting of the minimal root. We will focus on the relationship between these constraints and the semantic and phonological identification of the lexical item in perceptual terms. The second level of constraints may be characterised as morphophonological-pragmatic. Many verbs contain morphological units that block the formation of CDNs because their [+Latinate] character has a certain stylistic effect in terms of pragmatic usage. The third level of constraints pertains to lexical-conceptual structure combined with argument structure.We will show that (i) the constraints on the bases of CDNs are not exclusively founded on morphological incompatibilities between derivational affixes and other morphological units with which they join. Thus, a derivational mechanism that does not involve affixation, such as conversion, is also ruled by restrictions on the bases. (ii) Structural constraints – based on argument structures and on prosodic, morphological and lexical-semantic structures – are interwoven with processing and pragmatic conditions. (iii) Word formation is organised in structures that have interfaces with each other.

Niuean

10.1093/oso/9780198793557.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Diane Massam

Keyword(s):

Word Order ◽

Argument Structure ◽

Word Formation ◽

Left Periphery ◽

Sentence Structure ◽

Noun Incorporation ◽

The Pacific ◽

Theta Role ◽

This book presents a detailed descriptive and theoretical examination of predicate-argument structure in Niuean, a Polynesian language within the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family, spoken mainly on the Pacific island of Niue and in New Zealand. Niuean has VSO word order and an ergative case-marking system, both of which raise questions for a subject-predicate view of sentence structure. Working within a broadly Minimalist framework, this volume develops an analysis in which syntactic arguments are not merged locally to their thematic sources, but instead are merged high, above an inverted extended predicate which serves syntactically as the Niuean verb, later undergoing movement into the left periphery of the clause. The thematically lowest argument merges as an absolutive inner subject, with higher arguments merging as applicatives. The proposal relates Niuean word order and ergativity to its isolating morphology, by equating the absence of inflection with the absence of IP in Niuean, which impacts many aspects of its grammar. As well as developing a novel analysis of clause and argument structure, word order, ergative case, and theta role assignment, the volume argues for an expanded understanding of subjecthood. Throughout the volume, many other topics are also treated, such as noun incorporation, word formation, the parallel internal structure of predicates and arguments, null arguments, displacement typology, the role of determiners, and the structure of the left periphery.