Olga Batiukova

Polysemy in Verbs: Systematic Relations between Senses and their Effect on Annotation

Sense inventories for polysemous predicates are often comprised by a number of related senses. In this paper, we examine different types of relations within sense inventories and give a qualitative analysis of the effects they have on decisions made by the annotators and annotator error. We also discuss some common traps and pitfalls in design of sense inventories. We use the data set developed specifically for the task of annotating sense distinctions dependent predominantly on semantics of the arguments and only to a lesser extent on syntactic frame.

Identifying actional features through semantic priming: Cross-Romance comparison

This paper reports four priming experiments in Italian and Spanish, whose main goal was to empirically verify the psychological reality of two aspectual features crucially involved in event type classification, resultativity and durativity. The participants performed two semantic decision tasks targeting these features: in the durativity task, they were asked whether the verb referred to a durable situation, and in the resultativity task whether it denoted a situation with a clear outcome. The results obtained prove that both features are involved in online processing of the verb meaning: achievements and activities (respectively classified as [+resultative, durative] and [-resultative, +durative]) were processed faster in certain priming contexts. This suggests that resultativity and durativity belong to the mental representation of verbal semantics. The pattern of priming effects obtained in the Romance languages presents some striking similarities (in the resultativity task, only * We gratefully acknowledge the financial and technical support of Laboratorio di Linguistica (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) and the assistance of its staff members (Irene Ricci and Chiara Bertini). We thank all participants from Pisa and Madrid, who agreed to donate their time to take the tests (undergraduate students in Translation and Interpretation, Modern Languages, Anthropology, Geography, History and Science of Music, Political Science and Law, Food Science and Technology), and all the colleagues and friends who did not hesitate to help ‘recruiting’ them (Elena de Miguel, Fernando Arroyo, Maria Jesus Zamora, Carmen Valcarcel, Mohamed El-Madkouri Maataoui, Esperanza Molla y Jesus Penalosa Olivares). Many thanks to Elena de Miguel for her insightful and encouraging comments on this study. This project was partially financed by the research project “Diccionario electronico multilingue de verbos de movimiento con significado amplio (andar, ir, venir y volver)” (FFI2009-12191, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid). Some of the results reported in this paper have been discussed in Zarcone (2008), Zarcone and Lenci (2010), and Batiukova et al. (2012). QUADERNI DEL LABORATORIO DI LINGUISTICA – VOL. 13/2014 2 achievements benefited from priming) alongside some intriguing differences, and clearly contrasts with the behaviour of another language tested, Russian, whose aspectual system differs in significant ways. Two hypotheses can be proposed to account for these results, both pointing to some sort of processing advantage for the achievements. The first hypothesis invokes the nature of the features involved: durativity is continuous and contextually malleable, whereas resultativity is binary and hence more stable. The second hypothesis focuses on the ontology of events, predicting that priming emerges when the target verb is actionally ambiguous. In this respect, transitively used activity verbs should occasionally yield priming, for they may be used as accomplishments. However, transitivity was not systematically controlled in the experiments reported below. Achievements, on the other hand, are inherently ambiguous: they can refer either to the moment at which a change of state occurs or to the resultant state itself.

Annotation of Compositional Operations with GLML

In this paper, we introduce a methodology for annotating compositional operations in natural language text and describe the Generative Lexicon Mark-up Language (GLML), a mark-up language inspired by the Generative Lexicon model, for identifying such relations. While most annotation systems capture surface relationships, GLML captures the “compositional history” of the argument selection relative to the predicate. We provide a brief overview of GL before moving on to our proposed methodology for annotating with GLML. There are three main tasks described in the paper. The first one is based on atomic semantic types and the other two exploit more fine-grained meaning parameters encoded in the Qualia Structure roles: (i) Argument Selection and Coercion Annotation for the SemEval-2010 competition; (ii) Qualia Selection in modification constructions; (iii) Type selection in modification constructions and verb-noun combinations involving dot objects. We explain what each task comprises and include the XML format for annotated sample sentences. We show that by identifying and subsequently annotating the typing and subtyping shifts in these constructions, we gain an insight into the workings of the general mechanisms of composition.