Putting Context in SNACS: A 5-Way Classification of Adpositional Pragmatic Markers

What it is about

SNACS labels the meaning of prepositions with supersenses but sent pragmatic uses to a catch-all «discourse» tag. The authors add a Context branch with five labels for prepositional expressions that comment on content rather than add to it: Topical (as for me, with regards to cooking, when it comes to), Focus (as well, in itself, at that), Commentary (in my opinion, without a doubt, for sure, based on the reports: attribution, hedging, certainty), Coherence (in addition, in particular, besides, for instance: links between propositions), and plain Context (by the way, on that note, with all due respect); a sixth option says the use is semantic after all. They re-annotate the 165 discourse-tagged prepositions of three English SNACS corpora (web reviews, Reddit, The Little Prince) and study agreement and confusions; the boundary between Commentary and Coherence and between pragmatic and semantic readings (for some reason is Explanation) is the hardest.

Ideas

• I1. Keep pragmatic prepositional phrases out of frame roles: a closed list (in my opinion, in fact, of course, for sure, without a doubt, by the way, as for, in addition, in particular, for instance, at least, after all, as well) is matched as a unit before roles are assigned, so «For sure, the fox was clever» gets no Purpose oblique and «In fact» no place. Check against the idioms Mova already skips as mention heads in coref (for example, in fact), and measure frame bench oblique/place precision.
• I2. Route the matched phrases to the pragmatic labels where they belong: Commentary hedges (in my opinion, as far as I know) and boosters (without a doubt, for sure) to the hedge cue list in prag/data/cues.tsv; Topical (as for X) to the QUD reader as a topic shift that opens a new question about X (world/src/qud.rs); Coherence markers to links between frames (elaboration in particular, addition besides, example for instance), which Mova does not yet have beside cause and next. Measure hedge F1 in prag eval and the frame bench links.
• I3. Treat as for X and when it comes to X as contrastive topic: the frame that follows is about X in contrast to the previous topic, which matters for answering «What did the hare prefer?» when two characters' preferences are listed. A reader test with the contrast pair.

For Mova

32. Politeness and hedging §7 (hedging and boosting), 29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure.md (topic), 36-discourse-relations.md §6 (connectives), 38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers.md §4 (discourse markers). Code: prag/src/frames.rs, prag/data/cues.tsv, world/src/qud.rs, world/src/mwe.rs (multiword matching). Measures: frame bench oblique precision, hedge F1, QUD tests. SNACS corpora (CC BY-SA) only as tests.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{liu2022putting,
  title = {{Putting Context in SNACS: A 5-Way Classification of Adpositional Pragmatic Markers}},
  author = {Liu, Yang Janet and Hwang, Jena D. and Schneider, Nathan and Srikumar, Vivek},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 16th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVI) within LREC2022},
  year = {2022},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2022.law-1.15/}
}

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