Comprehensive and Consistent PropBank Light Verb Annotation

What it is about

The paper describes how PropBank's guidelines for light verb constructions (make an offer, take a bath, have a nap, give a kiss) were revised. The first guidelines relied on the rephrasing test (can the construction be replaced by the related verb?), which missed constructions without a related verb (commit suicide) and those whose rephrasing needs the passive (We got a call from the hospital = we were called). The new criterion is semantic: the construction is light when the arguments, including the subject, carry the roles of the noun's roleset rather than the verb's; the light verb only licenses them syntactically. Borderline «semi-light» cases where verb and noun share roles (give a hint, get a call, give a speech) are now annotated as light too, for consistency across light verbs. Agreement on the commonest light verbs (give, have, take, make, do) is 93.8%, and a detector trained on OntoNotes reaches F1 89% on BNC data and 80.7% on OntoNotes. A comparison with the Prague treebank's broader «support verb constructions» shows how definitions differ.

Ideas

• I1. Read light verb constructions as frames of the noun's verb: «the fox made an offer to the crow» → Event fox offer recipient=crow, «the bear took a nap» → Event bear nap, «gave the dog a bath» → Event _ bathe patient=dog. Use the noun→verb links of prag/data/nominals.tsv (WordNet) and the light-verb entries of the expression base (world/src/idioms.rs already tags LVCs as light-verb); the subject keeps the agent, a dative or to object becomes the noun's recipient or patient by the noun verb's VerbNet frame. Print How as «light verb make + noun offer». Measure frame bench verb/patient F1 and world knowledge diagnose on questions that use the plain verb («What did the fox offer?»).
• I2. Apply the paper's subject test as a guard: only when the subject plays the noun's agent (or experiencer) is it light; «We've had assassinations before», «It gives you a sense of terror» keep the verb's own reading. A negative-control test pair per light verb in the reader's tests.
• I3. Treat semi-light give/get consistently as the paper decided: «gave them a hint» → hint with recipient them; «got a call from the hospital» → call with agent hospital and recipient the subject. Check the effect on to-whom questions (Ask::Role(recipient)), a weak spot listed in docs/mmm-diagnosis.md.

For Mova

19. The lexicon: vocabulary, multiword expressions and register (multiword expressions, LVCs), 13-verbs.md, 30-pragmatics-overview.md §5. Code: prag/src/frames.rs, prag/data/nominals.tsv, world/src/idioms.rs, prag/src/vn.rs. Measures: frame bench verb and role F1, diagnosis step shares, course tests. PARSEME's LVC annotation (CC BY-SA) only as a test.

Topics: Semantic role labeling

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/2cd7p7jgoyrs

@inproceedings{bonial2016comprehensive,
  title = {{Comprehensive and Consistent PropBank Light Verb Annotation}},
  author = {Bonial, Claire and Palmer, Martha},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.63317/2cd7p7jgoyrs},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2cd7p7jgoyrs}
}

References

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