An Empirical Study on Vague Deictic Temporal Adverbials

Note: the PDF header says CC BY 4.0; the library card says CC BY-NC 4.0. The card follows the library card.

What it is about

Adverbials such as "just", "recently", "some time ago" and "long time ago" are deictic (their range depends on the moment of utterance) and vague (their range has borderline cases). The authors ask how speakers picture the range of each adverbial. They ran five online surveys with 100 native English adults each (Prolific). Each survey concerned one event type with a different duration and frequency: brushing teeth, birthday, marriage, vacation, year abroad. Participants rated 28 sentences on a five-point scale, mapped to a membership degree between 0 and 1. The curves show a fixed order of event types and the same curve shape for each adverbial; the main effect of event type is to stretch or compress the curve. The authors read this as a region in a conceptual space of past time, and the paper gives no fitted model.

Ideas

• I1. world/src/events.rs: represent each temporal adverbial as a graded membership function over time elapsed since the event, with one shared shape per adverbial and a per-event-type scale factor (duration and frequency). Store the table in a BTreeMap so the output is deterministic.
• I2. Test the "stretch or compress" claim as a measure: fit one shape with a scale per event type on half the curves and check the error on the other half. Compare with a per-type curve fit. A shuffled-scale control must do worse.
• I3. Use the graded values as a school item in world/src/knowledge.rs: ask which adverbial fits a stated time gap, and explain the choice by the membership values.

For Mova

The chapter is 22. Phrases: noun, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrases (temporal adverbial phrases) and 15. Adjectives and adverbs (vague gradable adverbs). The code is world/src/events.rs and the time handling in world/src/knowledge.rs. Measures: fit error of the shape-plus-scale model against the paper's published median curves (the figures are in the paper), and accuracy on a set of time-gap questions. Run twice to confirm identical output.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{kenneweg2024empirical,
  title = {{An Empirical Study on Vague Deictic Temporal Adverbials}},
  author = {Kenneweg, Svenja and Jackson, Brendan Balcerak and Deigmoeller, Joerg and Eggert, Julian and Cimiano, Philipp},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon @ LREC-COLING 2024},
  year = {2024},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2024.cogalex-1.3/}
}

References

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