Predicative Fonns in Natural Language and in Lexical Knowledge Bases

Predicative Fonns in Natural Language and in Lexical Knowledge Bases

Text, Speech and Language Technology VOLUME 6 Series Editors Nancy Ide, Vassar College, New York Jean Veronis, Universite de Provence and CNRS, France Editorial Board Harald Baayen, Max Planck Institute for Psycho linguistics, The Netherlands Kenneth W. Church,AT& T Bell Labs, New Jersey, USA Judith Klavans, Columbia University, New York, USA David T. Barnard, University of Regina, Canada Dan Tufis, Romanian Academy of Sciences, Romania Joaquim Llisterri, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain Stig Johansson, University of Oslo, Norway Joseph Mariani, LIMSI-CNRS, France The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

Predicative Forms in Natural Language and in Lexical Knowledge Bases Edited by Patrick Saint-Dizier IRIT-CNRS, Toulouse, France SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-90-481-5146-2 ISBN 978-94-017-2746-4 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-2746-4 Printed on acid-free paper Ali Rights Reserved 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner

Table of Contents Foreword vii An Introduction to the Lexical Semantics of Predicative Forms: 1 a Computational Perspective Patrick Saint-Dizier A Comparison of Different Lexical Semantics Approaches for 53 Transfer Verbs with a Particular Emphasis on Buy/Sell Federica Busa, Daniele Dubois, Christiane Fellbaum, Patrick Saint-Dizier, Evelyne Viegas The Organization of Verbs and Verb Concepts in a Semantic Net 93 Christiane Fellbaum Describing Verb Semantics in a Type Hierarchy: Disambiguation 111 of Italian verbs Achim Stein Alternations and Verb Semantic Classes for French: analysis and 139 class formation Patrick Saint-Dizier Semantics in Action 171 Evelyne Viegas, Kavi Mahesh, Sergei Nirenburg and Stephen Beale Corpus-Based Argument Identification Using a Statistically 205 Enriched Valency MRD Dimitrios Kokkinakis

vi Capturing Motion Verb Generalizations in Synchronous 229 Tree-Adjoining Grammar M. Palmer, J. Rosenzweig and W. Schuler Some Syntactic Consequences of Argument Structure Dimensions 257 Charles Jones Pragmatic Connectives As Predicates. The Case of Inferential 285 Connectives Jacques Jayez, Corinne Rossari Interlingual Representations of Complex Predicates in a 321 Multilin~al Approach: the Problem of Lexical Selection Maria Angeles Zareo The Semantics of Event-based Nominals 349 Federica Busa Index 375

Foreword This volume is a selection of papers presented at a workshop entitled Predicative Forms in Natural Language and in Lexical Knowledge Bases organized in Toulouse in August 1996. A predicate is a named relation that exists among one or more arguments. In natural language, predicates are realized as verbs, prepositions, nouns and adjectives, to cite the most frequent ones. Research on the identification, organization, and semantic representation of predicates in artificial intelligence and in language processing is a very active research field. The emergence of new paradigms in theoretical language processing, the definition of new problems and the important evolution of applications have, in fact, stimulated much interest and debate on the role and nature of predicates in naturallangage. From a broad theoretical perspective, the notion of predicate is central to research on the syntaxsemantics interface, the generative lexicon, the definition of ontology-based semantic representations, and the formation of verb semantic classes. From a computational perspective, the notion of predicate plays a central role in a number of applications including the design of lexical knowledge bases, the development of automatic indexing systems for the extraction of structured semantic representations, and the creation of interlingual forms in machine translation. In this volume, the notion of predicate is studied from several perspectives. Since it is not possible to be exhaustive in this broad domain, the aim is to address a number of current most important issues that can be classified as follows: - linguistic aspects, - the Generative lexicon, - corpus-based analysis, - verb semantic classes formation, - WordNet and relations among verbs, - knowledge representation and reasoning issues. Since most articles often address several of these issues at once, the structure of the volume reflects two major 'orthogonal' perspectives: the first seven papers deal with core issues in predication, and the last five present different theoretical prespectives. The Introduction provides an outline of the major issues and models of lexical semantics which are refered to in the subsequent articles. The models are compared more explicit ely in the second article, around the specific example of the verb pair buy/sell, which was the topic of a panel session, summarized here. The article by Christiane Fellbaum describes the foundations and the organization of the WordNet lexical base for verbs. The article vii

viii by Achim Stein focuses on verb semantic classes in Italian and their use in disambiguation, while the article by Patrick Saint-Dizier focuses rather on techniques for the formation of verb semantic classes. The article by Evelyne Viegas et al. is a presentation of a large-size project: Mikrokosmos with an emphasis on verbs describing actions. Finally, the article by Dimitrios Kokkinakis introduces a method for corpus-based acquisition of verb syntax and semantics. The second part of the volume, starts with an article by Martha Palmer et al. which presents a treatment of the relations between verb classes and syntax within the Tree Adjoining Grammar theory. The article by Charles Jones focusses on argument structure and introduces new perspectives on this much debated topic. The article by Jayez et al. introduces a particular form of predicates: connectors; their pragmatic aspects, in terms of inferences, are studied. The next article, by Maria Angeles Zarco, presents a detailed study of the interligual representation of complex predicates. Finally, the article by Federica Busa deals with the treatment of agentive nominals, a topic rarely addressed, within the framework of generative lexicon theory. I would like to thank the members of the programme committee for their help in making the workshop an interesting and productive exchange, and the anonymous reviewers for their contribution in preparing this volume. The programme committee of the workshop was composed of: Sabine Bergler, Ted Briscoe, Nicoletta Calzolari, Bonnie DOrT, Daniele Dubois, Christiane Fellbaum, Daniele Godard, Marie-Luce Herviou, Jacques Jayez, Judith Klavans, Beth Levin, Martha Palmer, James Pustejovsky and Jilrederique Segond. The workshop was in part sponsored by Rank Xerox, Meylan, France. Patrick Saint-Dizier