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Human Temporal Inferences Go Beyond Aspectual Class

What it is about

The imperfective paradox: "I was walking" entails "I walked", but "I was building a house" does not entail "I built a house". NLP work has treated aspectual class (telicity, durativity) as the key to this inference. The authors ask 108 native English speakers (120 recruited) on Prolific whether the simple past follows from the past progressive, for 50 verb phrases, using a slider from certain No to certain Yes. Atelic phrases get strong Yes answers, with one exception, "enjoy your company", which an interruption scenario divides. The telic phrases give mixed answers: 12 of 20 telic-durative and 2 of 10 telic-punctual items are Yes-skewed, and only 4 of the 30 telic items are strongly No-skewed. Aspectual class is therefore a weak guide to what people infer. Plausible scenarios, such as whether an action is likely to be interrupted, explain more. GPT-3.5 gives "mixed" answers for only 3 items and does not follow the human pattern.

Ideas

For Mova

The chapters are 13. Verbs, 30. Pragmatics and discourse: overview and 33. Implicature and presupposition. The code is prag/src/infer.rs and en/src/dict.rs. Measure the agreement of Mova's yes, no and unclear answers with the paper's majority answers on the 50 phrases, run twice to confirm identical output.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2024.eacl-long.115

@inproceedings{prus2024human,
  title = {{Human Temporal Inferences Go Beyond Aspectual Class}},
  author = {Pruś, Katarzyna and Steedman, Mark and Lopez, Adam},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.eacl-long.115},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.eacl-long.115}
}

References

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