When reading the paper it is beneficial to have some basic knowledge about
NomBank and
PropBank (and don't be confused by other resources: VerbNet, FrameNet, WordNet,…).
Although it is not crucial for understanding the paper, we are not sure about terminology of SRL (Semantic Role Labeling), for example in a sentence “Companies produce paper for customers.” (predicate produce in PropBank) or “There are three companies. Their production of paper for customers is growing.” (predicate production in NomBank):
| A | companies | paper | customers |
| B | arg0 | arg1 | arg2 |
| C | Agent | Theme | Beneficiary |
The question is how to call A, B, C using terms (theta) role, argument, argument position? My tip is A or B=argument, C=role. What about your tips?
Note that word “case” has in linguistics two meanings (not speaking of “test case” meaning): a) morphological case, i.g. nominative, genitive, dative and b) semantic case aka theta role, thematic case, deep case. We think that the second paragraph of section 2 (case-marked expressions in Japanese) speaks about a), although Charles Fillmore is mentioned in the next paragraph.
Section 3.1 states that “We limited our attention to nominal predicates with unambiguous role sets”. At first glance, I considered this as too restricting given that most frequent predicates are ambiguous. Now, I have discovered that just 595 out of 4705 predicates in NomBank are considered ambiguous (e.g. way.01=“ability-with-agent/attribute”, way.02=“path”, way.03=“issue”,… way.13=“idiom/nomadvlike-backward”). Well,…
The description of feature 10 in Table 2 (“Head word of p's right sibling node”) is unclear. First, according to examples price:drop and price:index, there is missing “p:” in the description. Second, what does “Head word of p's right sibling node” mean? We thought, siblings should have same head word.