Merging PropBank, NomBank, TimeBank, Penn Discourse Treebank and Coreference

What it is about

Separate annotation projects each cover one part of semantics: PropBank and NomBank (predicate-argument structure of verbs and nouns), TimeBank (events, times and their links), the Penn Discourse Treebank (connectives as predicates), and Essex coreference (MATE scheme). The paper argues that these layers should be merged into one unified linguistic annotation (ULA), kept as separate layers that can be recombined. It works through two ACE sentences ("the Pie in the Sky" example) and shows the conflicts that merging exposes: light-verb constructions ("take a walk", "give a standing ovation") where verb and noun both carry arguments; idioms, which PropBank and NomBank treat differently; and modal subordination, where "suggests" governs the modal events "cut" and "mold" through SLINKs. The paper reports no accuracy figures. Its recommendation is supervised merging, with conflicts used to correct the original layers. The corpora cited are the 1M-word Penn Treebank WSJ section for PropBank, about 5,000 common nouns for NomBank, and 200 TimeBank news documents.

Ideas

• I1. Keep Mova's layers apart, as the paper proposes: the parse (en/src/parse.rs), the frames (prag), the event timeline (world) and the coreference links (coref) each stored as a separate table keyed by token span, with a merge step that reports conflicts rather than overwriting. Measure the conflict count per school text.
• I2. A support-verb rule in the lexicon (en/src/dict.rs): a verb that takes an NP and an XP where the XP is an argument of the NP's head ("take a walk", "give a standing ovation") gets the noun as the predicate and the verb as support, with the paper's exception for idioms. Test on the paper's examples, with "make a mistake" as the case where the subject selection is inherited from the noun.
• I3. Modal subordination as an event link: the events under a modal or a verb of saying are stored as subordinate, so that a question about "cut" is answered as "possible", not "happened". Test on the paper's "suggests ... can be cut or molded" sentence.
• I4. A quality gate from the paper's merging idea: when the parse and the frames disagree on who did what (a conflict), keep both analyses and count the disagreements per chapter of the grammar. Run it twice to confirm the counts are identical.

For Mova

The chapters are 19. The lexicon: vocabulary, multiword expressions and register (light verbs, idioms, multi-word expressions), 10. Word classes and 11. Nouns (nominalizations and relational nouns), 21. The simple clause (argument structure) and 36. Discourse relations and coherence (connectives as relations). The code is en/src/dict.rs for the support-verb entries, en/src/parse.rs for the trees, prag/src/frames.rs for the layer comparison, world/src/events.rs for the subordinated events, and coref for the links. The measures are the conflict count per text and the accuracy on the paper's light-verb examples, run twice.

Topics: Discourse analysis · Coreference resolution · Treebanks · Semantic role labeling

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/1608829.1608831

@inproceedings{pustejovsky2005merging,
  title = {{Merging PropBank, NomBank, TimeBank, Penn Discourse Treebank and Coreference}},
  author = {Pustejovsky, James and Meyers, Adam and Palmer, Martha and Poesio, Massimo},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotations II: Pie in the Sky},
  year = {2005},
  doi = {10.3115/1608829.1608831},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1608829.1608831}
}

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