Building a reference lexicon for countability in English

What it is about

The paper builds a lexicon that gives the count-mass class of about 14,000 English nouns, one entry per noun-sense pair. Each noun-sense pair is answered in a questionnaire of six questions about its use, and the answers assign a fine-grained class between count and mass. The starting nouns and senses come from the Open ANC and WordNet. The reference lexicon holds 13,804 noun-sense pairs: 1,000 were annotated by four speakers, and the rest by two annotators each. Krippendorff's alpha is between 0.694 and 0.755. The lexicon shows a middle group of dual-life nouns, which act as mass and as count, and object-mass senses are very rare (0.58% of the total).

Ideas

• I1. Add a countability column (count, mass, dual) to the rows of data/lemmas.tsv and use it in en/src/expert.rs to check the determiner: "a car" and "much water" should agree with the class. Measure: rule accuracy on EWT test determiner-noun pairs, with and without the column.
• I2. Run the six questions as deterministic probes over the Mova raw collection, counting "a N", "much N" and plural forms, and report the probe result next to the class. Measure: agreement with the paper's class on a held-out sample. The gold data are NC, so this is a test only.
• I3. Flag dual-life nouns in prag/world as an ambiguity, so that the reading is given with its reason and not decided silently. Measure: the share of EWT sentences where the flag changes a determiner check.

For Mova

The chapters are 10. Word classes and 11. Nouns. The code is en/src/lexgen.rs and data/lemmas.tsv (the new column), and en/src/expert.rs (the check). The lexicon is LREC NC: its entries are a test resource only, and the countability column must be made from Mova's own probes.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{kiss2014building,
  title = {{Building a reference lexicon for countability in English}},
  author = {Kiss, Tibor and Pelletier, Francis Jeffry and Stadtfeld, Tobias},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)},
  year = {2014},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/L14-1312/}
}

References

22 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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