Table of Contents
Beyond NomBank: A Study of Implicit Arguments for Nominal Predicates
Matthew Gerber and Joyce Y. Chai
http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/P/P10/P10-1160.pdf
Comments
- The paper (& PropBank & NomBank) is about valency and dependency structure of a sentence, although the paper does not use these terms.
- 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.
What do we like about the paper
- clever way of exploiting coreference chains
- link to annotations and the data needed to replicate the experimets
- considering IAA (inter annotator agreement) and measuring Cohen's kappa
Written by — Martin Popel 2010/10/14 14:38