[Lexicog] Semantic parsing

[David Frank]

from David Frank again:

When I checked out FrameNet, I was hoping to see something more like an 
extension Fillmore's Case Grammar. If Case Grammar turned out to be 
unwieldy, this project of sematic tagging seems even more so. I'm sure this 
semantic tagging could be useful for artificial intelligence, if the bugs 
can be worked out. But I was looking for something that was still tied 
somewhat to linguistic form and am uncomfortable trying to navigate my way 
through the universe of pure semantics.

Please pardon my ignorance, but does anyone know of an analysis of a set of 
basic English verbs that is based on Fillmore's earlier Case Grammar? I 
always thought it would be quite valuable to have that kind of information 
in a dictionary.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Maxwell" <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 12:54 PM
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Semantic parsing


Patrick Hanks wrote:
> I guess all this reinforces the point that semantic tagging is more
> problematic than part-of-speeech tagging.

Those of us who are old codgers will remember that Fillmore's "Case for
Case", which came out in 1968, used basically the same sort of semantic
tagging as is being discussed here--agent, patient, etc.  Over the next
several years, any number of case systems were proposed, which offered
more (usually) or fewer cases.  (SILers on this list may also remember
that for a time, these semantic cases were an essential part of Tagmemic
descriptions.  And even Chomsky referred to such things as Theta Roles,
although it's hard to tell how seriously he took them.)

One of the strongest criticisms of this enterprise, I believe, was that
there was never any principled way of choosing a universal case system,
or even a language-particular one (with the possible exception of
languages like those of the Philippines, where you could argue that the
set of language-particular case roles was the same as the actual case
distinctions made in the morphosyntax).

Another criticism of Fillmorean case grammars was that there were always
borderline cases (pardon the pun), where you couldn't decide for a
particular clause or verb which case to assign one of its NPs to.

In the end, the linguistic community largely gave up on Fillmore-style
case grammar, AFAIK.



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