Abstract
Semantic role theory is a widely used approach for verb representation. Yet, there are multiple indications that semantic role paradigm is necessary but not sufficient to cover all elements of verb structure. We conducted a statistical analysis of semantic role representation in VerbNet and FrameNet to provide empirical evidence of insufficiency. The consequence of that is a hybrid role-scalar approach.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Each verb in PropBank has verb-specific numbered roles: Arg0, Arg1, Arg2, etc. with several more general roles that can be applied to any verb. That makes semantic role labeling too coarse-grained. Most verbs have two to four numbered roles. And although the tagging guidelines include a “descriptor” field for each role, such as “kicker” for Arg0 or “instrument” for Arg2 in the frameset of the verb kick, it does not have any theoretical standing [5].
- 3.
- 4.
More accurate to use the term verb sense here because of verb polycemy.
- 5.
- 6.
We modified the original comparison presented in [14] for our own purposes.
- 7.
The expression classes/frames is used hereinafter to emphasize that verbs are grouped into classes in VN and into frames in FN.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
References
Fillmore, Ch.: The case for case. In: Universals in Linguistic Theory, pp. 1–88 (1968)
Dowty, D.: Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67, 547–619 (1991)
Baker, C., Fillmore, Ch., Lowe, J.: The Berkeley FrameNet project. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, pp. 86–90 (1998)
Kipper-Schuler, K.: VerbNet: a broad-coverage, comprehensive verb lexicon. Ph.D. thesis. Computer and Information Science Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (2005)
Palmer, M., Gildea, D., Kingsbury, P.: The proposition bank: an annotated corpus of semantic roles. Comput. Linguist. 31(1), 71–106 (2005)
Marcus, M., et al.: The penn treebank: annotating predicate argument structure. In: ARPA Human Language Technology Workshop (1994)
Fellbaum, Ch., Miller, G.: Folk psychology or semantic entailment? A reply to Rips and Conrad. Psychol. Rev. 97, 565–570 (1990)
Petukhova, V., Bunt, H.: LIRICS semantic role annotation: design and evaluation of a set of data categories. In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Marrakech, Morocco (2008)
Claire, B., Corvey, W., Palmer, M., Bunt, H.: A hierarchical unification of LIRICS and VerbNet semantic roles. In: Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2011), Palo Alto, CA, USA (2011)
Bunt, H., Palmer, M.: Conceptual and representational choices in defining an ISO standard for semantic role annotation. In: Proceedings of the Ninth Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-9), Potsdam, Germany (2013)
Levin, B.: English verb classes and alternations: a preliminary investigation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL (1993)
Fillmore, Ch.: Frame semantics. In: Linguistics in the Morning Calm, pp. 111–137. Hanshin, Seoul (1982)
Fillmore, Ch., Atkins, T.: Toward a frame-based lexicon: the semantics of RISK and its neighbors. In: Frames, Fields, and Contrasts: New Essays in Semantic and Lexical Organization, pp. 75–102. Erlbaum, Hillsdale (1992)
Baker, C., Ruppenhofer, J.: FrameNet’s frames vs. Levin’s verb classes. In: Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, California, USA, pp. 27–38 (2002)
Dixon, R.: Where Have All the Adjectives Gone? and Other Essays in Semantics and Syntax. Mouton, Berlin (1982)
Dixon, R.: A Semantic Approach to English Grammar. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2005)
Rappaport Hovav, M.: Lexicalized meaning and the internal temporal structure of events. In: Crosslinguistic and Theoretical Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect, pp. 13–42. John Benjamins, Amsterdam (2008)
Rappaport Hovav, M.: Scalar roots and their results. In: Workshop on Roots: Word Formation from the Perspective of “Core Lexical Elements”, Universitat Stuttgart, Stuttgart (2009)
Gardenfors, P.: The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces. MIT Press, Cambridge (2017)
Gardenfors, P., Warglien, M.: Using conceptual spaces to model actions and events. J. Semant. 29(4), 487–519 (2012)
Warglien, M., Gardenfors, P., Westera, M.: Event structure, conceptual spaces and the semantics of verbs. Theor. Linguist. 38(3–4), 159–193 (2012)
Jackendoff, R.: Semantics and Cognition. MIT Press, Cambridge (1983)
Jackendoff, R.: Semantic Structures. MIT Press, Cambridge (1990)
Jackendoff, R.: Foundations of Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002)
Fleischhauer, J.: Degree Gradation of Verbs. Dusseldorf University Press, Dusseldorf (2016)
Pustejovsky, J., Palmer, M., Zaenen, A., Brown, S.: Verb meaning in context: integrating VerbNet and GL predicative structures. In: Proceedings of the LREC 2016 Workshop: ISA-12, Potoroz, Slovenia (2016)
Pustejovsky, J.: Events and the semantics of opposition. In: Events as Grammatical Objects, pp. 445–482. Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford (2010)
Fellbaum, Ch., Mathieu, Y.: A corpus-based construction of emotion verb scales. In: Linguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context. John Benjamins, Amsterdam (2014)
Snell-Hornby, M.: Verb-descriptivity in German and English. A Contrastive Study in Semantic Fields. Winter, Heidelberg (1983)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Huminski, A., Liausvia, F., Goel, A. (2023). Semantic Roles in VerbNet and FrameNet: Statistical Analysis and Evaluation. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13452. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24340-0_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24340-0_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-24339-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-24340-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)