The recent past has witnessed a predominance of robust empirical methods in natural language structure prediction, but mostly through the analysis of syntax. Wide-coverage analysis of the underlying meaning or semantics of natural language utterances still remains a major obstacle for language understanding. A primary bottleneck lies in the scarcity of high-quality and large amounts of annotate...

In this paper we develop an approach to tackle the problem of verb selection for learners of English as a second language (ESL) by using features from the output of Semantic Role Labeling (SRL). Unlike existing approaches to verb selection that use local features such as n-grams, our approach exploits semantic features which explicitly model the usage context of the verb. The verb choice highly...

This research contrasts two hypotheses concerning componential storage of meaning. The Complexity Hypothesis assumed by Fodor (The language of thought, NY: Crowell, 1975), Kintsch (The representation of meaning in memory, Hillsdale, NJ : Erlbaum, 1974), and Thorndyke (Conceptual complexity and imagery in comprehension and memory . Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1975, 14, 359-36...

This paper presents a semantic classification of reflexive verbs in Bulgarian, augmenting the morphosyntactic classes of verbs in the large Bulgarian Lexical Data Base a language resource utilized in a number of Language Engineering (LE) applications. The semantic descriptors conform to the Unified Eventity Representation (UER), developed by Andrea Schalley. The UER is a graphical formalism, in...

The subject of like has the semantic role of Experiencer, while the object is the Stimulus. Like and similar verbs belong to the class of Experiencer-Stimulus verbs (ES). In continuation experiments, where participants are asked to write continuations of sentences/clauses after certain verbs followed by a connective and (often) an ambiguous pronoun, as in (1), participants show a strong and rob...

This paper presents a method for identifying an opinion with its holder and topic, given a sentence in online news media texts. We introduce an approach of exploiting the semantic structure of a sentence, anchored to an opinion bearing verb or adjective. This method uses semantic role labeling as an intermediate step to label an opinion holder and topic using FrameNet data. We decompose our tas...

there are different processes to form new words in every language, including compounding, derivation, inflection, etc. in compounding, two lexical stems form a compound. in derivation and inflection, new words are coined by affixation or some phonetic changes. this kind of affixation is applied on the simple or compound stem. here our compound stem is a bound compound stem, consisting of a noun...

This article describes a semantic parser based on FrameNet semantic roles that uses a broad knowledge base created by interconnecting three major resources: FrameNet, VerbNet and PropBank. We link the above resources through a mapping between Intersective Levin classes, which are part of PropBank’s annotation, and the FrameNet frames. By using Levin classes, we successfully detect FrameNet sema...

Introduction The interpretation of verb meaning hinges in large part on the argument structure of the verb. In a series of experiments, young children have been found to use the number and type of arguments that appear with a verb in order to determine its meaning (e.g., Fisher 1996, 2002; Goldberg 2004; Landau & Gleitman 1985; Lidz, Gleitman & Gleitman 2003; Naigles 1990). For example, when he...

This paper describes an investigation of some potential features for a statistical approach to inferring the semantics of verb-particle constructions from corpus data. Verb-particles cause particular problems for the computational semantic analysis of language, because their meaning often cannot be derived through the usual compositional methods of analysis. Two novel techniques are presented w...