semantic roles for LFG grammar engineering

[Stella Markantonatou]

Dear Adam,

one question is why you need to assign semantic roles to arguments and adjuncts. Would you like to model alternations on the basis of lexical semantics (in the spirit say of LMT)? I would agree with Stefan that a simple interface would serve your purposes better, if this is your intention.

Of course, one can always establish some (loose) correspondence between semantic roles and a simple interface (a similar idea was worked out  by Anthony Davis back in2001). This approach leaves more room for using semantic role labels or something like that without  relying on them for predicting syntactic behavior. 


Best,

Stella Markantonatou




On Monday, February 3, 2014 1:34 AM, Adam Przepiorkowski <adamp at IPIPAN.WAW.PL> wrote:
 
Dear All,

[Apologies for cross-posting.]

In the context of enriching the Polish LFG grammar with semantic
representation, we are looking for a set of semantic roles (Agent,
Patient, Beneficiary, etc.) that could be used to mark arguments (and
possibly adjuncts) of verbs and other predicates.  This set should be
exhaustive in the sense that it should be possible to assign – more or
less deterministically – a semantic role to any argument (and possibly
adjunct) of any predicate.  For this reason the standard – in LFG
textbooks – sets of some 7 semantic roles do not seem sufficient.
Instead, we are looking at larger repertoires proposed in VerbNet, in
FrameNet and in John W. Sowa's work on Knowledge Representation.

We don't have any strong views about any particular set of semantic
roles, as long as it is exhaustive and applicable to real texts (as
opposed to being merely theoretically interesting).  Has anybody in the
LFG community faced a similar task?  If so, what set of semantic roles
would you recommend?  At the moment, we are wavering between VerbNet and
Sowa's system, both being more manageable than numerous roles offered
in FrameNet, but we are open to other solutions.

Many thanks, best regards,

Adam P.

-- 
Adam Przepiórkowski                          ˈadam ˌpʃɛpjurˈkɔfskʲi
http://clip.ipipan.waw.pl/ ____ Computational Linguistics in Poland
http://jlm.ipipan.waw.pl/ ___________ Journal of Language Modelling
http://zil.ipipan.waw.pl/ ____________ Linguistic Engineering Group
http://nkjp.pl/ _________________________ National Corpus of Polish
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