Integrating Aspectually Relevant Properties of Verbs into a Morphological Analyzer for English

What it is about

The paper is a short design note, with no evaluation. It shows how lexical semantic classes of English verbs can be written into a finite-state morphological analyser (xfst and foma, with a lexc lexicon). The base analyser has one inflectional class for regular verbs and a list of strong verbs. Vendler's four aspect classes are rejected for this purpose: they classify verb phrases, not verbs, and one verb can belong to several of them. The author uses the Levin and Rappaport Hovav view instead, where a dynamic verb lexicalises either a scale (result) or a manner, so the classes are disjoint. Each class becomes a separate sub-lexicon of the regular verbs, with the same continuation lexicon, and irregular verbs get a semantic tag. Dependency-style valency tags (for example subject-verb-object) are attached to whole classes, and one surface form can yield alternative analyses. The paper ends by noting that the method becomes hard for inflectionally rich languages.

Ideas

• I1. Disjoint verb classes in world/src/dictionary.rs: tag each verb as manner or result (the school dictionary already has word senses), using the disjoint split and not Vendler's overlapping one. Check that every verb gets exactly one class.
• I2. Use the manner/result split in the frame reader (prag/src/frames.rs): manner verbs allow an unspecified object ("she swept"), result verbs need one. A rule that reads the class and the object's presence gives an explanation for each reading.
• I3. Regression gate for the morphology: when the regular verbs are split into classes in en/src/morph.rs, the generated forms must be byte-identical to the unsplit lexicon for every verb. Run it twice.
• I4. Negative control: give each verb a random class and show that the frame-reader accuracy falls. If it does not, the class is not used.

For Mova

The chapters are 13. Verbs (verb classes) and 28. Voice and the passive (argument realisation). The code is en/src/morph.rs (class sub-lexicons), world/src/dictionary.rs (the class tag) and prag/src/frames.rs (the object rule). The paper gives no numbers, so the measures are the identity test on inflected forms and the negative control above. The paper is NC-licensed: use the design only and build any class data from Mova's own rules.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{bontcheva2012integrating,
  title = {{Integrating Aspectually Relevant Properties of Verbs into a Morphological Analyzer for English}},
  author = {Bontcheva, Katina},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Finite State Methods and Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W12-6205/}
}

References

16 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Kenneth R. Beesley and Lauri Karttunen. 2003. Finite State Morphology. Palo Alto, CA: CSLI Publications David Dowty. 1979. Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel. find
2. William Foley and Robert Van Valin, Jr. 1984. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
3. Ulrich Heid, Janina Radtke and Anette Klosa. 2012. Morphology and Semantics: A Survey of Morphological Analyzers and Interactive Online Dictionaries – and Proposals for their Improvement. 15th International Morphology Meeting. Morphology and Meaning. Vienna, February 9-12, 2012 find
4. Mans Hulden. 2009a. Finite-State Machine Construction Methods and Algorithms for Phonology and Morphology. PhD Thesis, University of Arizona. find
5. Mans Hulden. 2009b. Foma: a Finite-State Compiler and Library. In: Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Demonstrations Session, pp. 29-32. find
6. Beth Levin. 1993. English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.. find
7. Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport Hovav. 1991. Wiping the Slate Clean: A Lexical Semantic Exploration. In: B. Levin and S. Pinker, (eds.). Special Issue on Lexical and Conceptual Semantics. Cognition 41, pp. 123-151. ↗
8. Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport Hovav. 1995. Unaccusativity: At the Syntax-Lexical Semantics Interface. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. find
9. Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport Hovav. 2005. Argument Realization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. find
10. Malka Rappaport Hovav. 2008. Lexicalized Meaning and the Internal Temporal Structure of Events. In: S. Rothstein, (ed.), Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 13-42. find
11. Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin. 1998. Building Verb Meanings. In: M. Butt and W. Geuder, (eds.). The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pp. 97-134. find
12. Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin. 2001. An Event Structure Account of English Resultatives. Language 77, pp. 766-797. ↗
13. Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin. 2005. Change of State Verbs: Implications for Theories of Argument Projection. In: N. Erteschik-Shir and T. Rapoport (eds.) The Syntax of Aspect. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 274-286. ↗
14. Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin. 2010. Reflections on Manner/Result Complementarity. In: M. Rappaport Hovav, E. Doron, and I. Sichel (eds.). Syntax, Lexical Semantics, and Event Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–38. find
15. Gregory Stump. 2001. Inflectional Morphology: A Theory of Paradigm Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
16. Zeno Vendler. 1957. Verbs and Times. The Philosophical Review, Vol. 66, No. 2., pp. 143-60 ↗

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