Recent developments and open questions in the field of semantic roles

This introductory chapter briefly introduces a few milestones in the voluminous previous literature on semantic roles, and charts the territory in which the papers of this volume aim to make a contribution. This territory is characterized by fairly disparate conceptualizations of semantic roles and their status in theories of grammar and the lexicon, as well as by diverse and probably complementary ways of deriving or identifying them based on linguistic data. Particular attention is given to the question of how selected roles appear to relate to each other, and we preliminarily address the issue of how roles, subroles, and role complexes are best thought of in general.

Advances in Research on Semantic Roles

Especially in functional-typological linguistics, semantic roles have been studied thoroughly, because they constitute a good starting point for any study on argument marking due to their semantically defined nature. However, the very concept of semantic roles is far from being without problems, and there is still no consensus on how the roles are best defined. In this volume, the notion will be discussed from novel perspectives with the aim of providing new insights into our understanding of semantic roles. Two of the papers deal with semantic role clusters, one with semantic roles in verbless constructions, one with diachrony of semantic roles and two with individual semantic roles that have not been studied in too much detail in previous studies. The book may not offer answers to all questions the readers may have, but at least it raises interesting further questions relevant to arriving at a better understanding of semantic roles.

Applying semantic knowledge to the automatic processing of temporal expressions and events in natural language

This paper addresses the problem of the automatic recognition and classification of temporal expressions and events in human language. Efficacy in these tasks is crucial if the broader task of temporal information processing is to be successfully performed. We analyze whether the application of semantic knowledge to these tasks improves the performance of current approaches. We therefore present and evaluate a data-driven approach as part of a system: TIPSem. Our approach uses lexical semantics and semantic roles as additional information to extend classical approaches which are principally based on morphosyntax. The results obtained for English show that semantic knowledge aids in temporal expression and event recognition, achieving an error reduction of 59% and 21%, while in classification the contribution is limited. From the analysis of the results it may be concluded that the application of semantic knowledge leads to more general models and aids in the recognition of temporal entities that are ambiguous at shallower language analysis levels. We also discovered that lexical semantics and semantic roles have complementary advantages, and that it is useful to combine them. Finally, we carried out the same analysis for Spanish. The results obtained show comparable advantages. This supports the hypothesis that applying the proposed semantic knowledge may be useful for different languages.

Biologically Plausible Connectionist Prediction of Natural Language Thematic Relations

In Natural Language Processing (NLP) symbolic systems, several linguistic phenomena, for instance, the thematic role relationships between sentence constituents, such as AGENT, PATIENT, and LOCATION, can be accounted for by the employment of a rule-based grammar. Another approach to NLP concerns the use of the connectionist model, which has the benefits of learning, generalization and fault tolerance, among others. A third option merges the two previous approaches into a hybrid one: a symbolic thematic theory is used to supply the connectionist network with initial knowledge. Inspired on neuroscience, it is proposed a symbolic-connectionist hybrid system called BIO theta PRED (BIOlogically plausible thematic (theta) symbolic-connectionist PREDictor), designed to reveal the thematic grid assigned to a sentence. Its connectionist architecture comprises, as input, a featural representation of the words (based on the verb/noun WordNet classification and on the classical semantic microfeature representation), and, as output, the thematic grid assigned to the sentence. BIO theta PRED is designed to ""predict"" thematic (semantic) roles assigned to words in a sentence context, employing biologically inspired training algorithm and architecture, and adopting a psycholinguistic view of thematic theory.

From possessive pronoun to emphatic determiner: 'so' in Mauritian Creole

This paper argues that at a particular stage in the genesis of Mauritian Creole (MC), the 3sg possessive pronoun 'so', inherited from the French 'son' was used as a definite determiner as well as a possessive pronoun. It was used when there was a need to single out a unique element in the discourse, or to introduce a new referent which was to become the focus of attention. 'So' was mostly used with genitive constructions, where a phonologically null determiner was equally grammatical. This paper argues that, in the early creole, genitive constructions licensed the determinative use of this pronoun. The use of 'so' with genitive constructions is no longer grammatical in modern MC, but this particle continues to be used as an emphatic determiner, where it now modifies both singular and plural NPs.

Annotation syntaxico-sémantique des actants en corpus spécialisé

L’annotation en rôles sémantiques est une tâche qui permet d’attribuer des étiquettes de rôles telles que Agent, Patient, Instrument, Lieu, Destination etc. aux différents participants actants ou circonstants (arguments ou adjoints) d’une lexie prédicative. Cette tâche nécessite des ressources lexicales riches ou des corpus importants contenant des phrases annotées manuellement par des linguistes sur lesquels peuvent s’appuyer certaines approches d’automatisation (statistiques ou apprentissage machine). Les travaux antérieurs dans ce domaine ont porté essentiellement sur la langue anglaise qui dispose de ressources riches, telles que PropBank, VerbNet et FrameNet, qui ont servi à alimenter les systèmes d’annotation automatisés. L’annotation dans d’autres langues, pour lesquelles on ne dispose pas d’un corpus annoté manuellement, repose souvent sur le FrameNet anglais. Une ressource telle que FrameNet de l’anglais est plus que nécessaire pour les systèmes d’annotation automatisé et l’annotation manuelle de milliers de phrases par des linguistes est une tâche fastidieuse et exigeante en temps. Nous avons proposé dans cette thèse un système automatique pour aider les linguistes dans cette tâche qui pourraient alors se limiter à la validation des annotations proposées par le système. Dans notre travail, nous ne considérons que les verbes qui sont plus susceptibles que les noms d’être accompagnés par des actants réalisés dans les phrases. Ces verbes concernent les termes de spécialité d’informatique et d’Internet (ex. accéder, configurer, naviguer, télécharger) dont la structure actancielle est enrichie manuellement par des rôles sémantiques. La structure actancielle des lexies verbales est décrite selon les principes de la Lexicologie Explicative et Combinatoire, LEC de Mel’čuk et fait appel partiellement (en ce qui concerne les rôles sémantiques) à la notion de Frame Element tel que décrit dans la théorie Frame Semantics (FS) de Fillmore. Ces deux théories ont ceci de commun qu’elles mènent toutes les deux à la construction de dictionnaires différents de ceux issus des approches traditionnelles. Les lexies verbales d’informatique et d’Internet qui ont été annotées manuellement dans plusieurs contextes constituent notre corpus spécialisé. Notre système qui attribue automatiquement des rôles sémantiques aux actants est basé sur des règles ou classificateurs entraînés sur plus de 2300 contextes. Nous sommes limités à une liste de rôles restreinte car certains rôles dans notre corpus n’ont pas assez d’exemples annotés manuellement. Dans notre système, nous n’avons traité que les rôles Patient, Agent et Destination dont le nombre d’exemple est supérieur à 300. Nous avons crée une classe que nous avons nommé Autre où nous avons rassemblé les autres rôles dont le nombre d’exemples annotés est inférieur à 100. Nous avons subdivisé la tâche d’annotation en sous-tâches : identifier les participants actants et circonstants et attribuer des rôles sémantiques uniquement aux actants qui contribuent au sens de la lexie verbale. Nous avons soumis les phrases de notre corpus à l’analyseur syntaxique Syntex afin d’extraire les informations syntaxiques qui décrivent les différents participants d’une lexie verbale dans une phrase. Ces informations ont servi de traits (features) dans notre modèle d’apprentissage. Nous avons proposé deux techniques pour l’identification des participants : une technique à base de règles où nous avons extrait une trentaine de règles et une autre technique basée sur l’apprentissage machine. Ces mêmes techniques ont été utilisées pour la tâche de distinguer les actants des circonstants. Nous avons proposé pour la tâche d’attribuer des rôles sémantiques aux actants, une méthode de partitionnement (clustering) semi supervisé des instances que nous avons comparée à la méthode de classification de rôles sémantiques. Nous avons utilisé CHAMÉLÉON, un algorithme hiérarchique ascendant.

A relação gramatical objeto direto : implicações para o ensino de língua materna

This paper attempts to investigate the discourse manifestations of the grammatical relation direct object with respect to the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties that underlie this element. The research adopts theoretical orientation of the functionalism from North American and Brazilian schools inspired in Givón (1995, 2001), Hopper and Thompson (1980), Chafe (1979), Furtado da Cunha, Oliveira, Martelotta (2003) inter alia. From functionalism, the research uses principles of iconicity, markedness and informativity and it analize categories of transitivity, grounding and animacy. This research is anchored in prototype model (TAYLOR 1995); construction grammar model (GOLDBERG 1996, 2002). Both theoretical orientations share the view that language is a malleable living organism subject to socio-cultural context. Grammar is then the result of created, maintained, and systematized linguistic patterns developed from and used for language use. According to a functional linguistics and cognitivist linguistics verbs are stored in the speakers lexicon in syntactic-semantic frames which are more frequent. These frames carry information concerning obligatory and optional arguments and the semantic roles these arguments take in the clause. The analysis focuses on the semantic type of the verbs and its relationship with the argument encoded as a direct object observing the aspectual nature of verbs. Direct objects are classified according to their morphology (lexical or pronominal noun phrase), semantic role, informational content and animacy. This study discusses pedagogical implications with relation to how the grammatical concepts touched on this paper are treated in school textbooks. The empirical data come from Corpus Discurso & Gramática: a língua falada e escrita na cidade do Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998). This corpus is composed of texts that contain spoken and written modalities. These modalities are in turn organized according to different types: personal narratives, retold narrative, description of preferred place, procedural place, procedural description and report on argumentation. The sample data totals 40 texts produced by four language consultants of the last graduation date. The paper shows that the same syntactic structures (formed through Subject-Verb-Object) correspond to different semantic-pragmatic structures in relation to specific communicative purposes even verb is an event, process or state. The argument structure are not aleatory but are related to experience; that is the way humans conceptualize the world and talk about it

"Eu pensei que ia sair daqui falando inglês": um estudo sistêmico-funcional sobre papéis sociais atribuídos por alunos de um curso de Letras/Inglês

Research in the area of teacher training in English as a Foreign Language (CELANI, 2003, 2004, 2010; PAIVA, 2000, 2003, 2005; VIEIRA-ABRAHÃO, 2010) articulates the complexity of beginning teachers classroom contexts aligned with teaching language as a social and professional practice of the teacher in training. To better understand this relationship, the present study is based on a corpus of transcribed interviews and questionnaires applied to 28 undergraduate students majoring in Letters/English emphasis, at a public university located in the interior of the Western Amazon region, soliciting their opinions about the reforms made in the curriculum of this Major. Interviews and questionnaires were used as data collection instruments to trace a profile of the students organized in Group 1, with freshmen and sophomore undergraduates who are following the 2009 curriculum, and Group 2, with junior and senior undergraduates who are following the 2006 curriculum. The objectives are to identify, to characterize and to analyze the types of pronouns, roles and social actors represented in the opinions of these students in relation to their teacher training curriculum. The theoretical support focuses on the challenge of historical and contemporary routes from English teachers initial education programs (MAGALHÃES; LIBERALLI, 2009; PAVAN; SILVA, 2010; ALVAREZ, 2010; VIANA, 2011; PAVAN, 2012). Our theoretical perspective is based on the Systemic Functional Grammar of Halliday (1994), Halliday and Hasan (1989), Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), Eggins (1994; 2004) and Thompson (2004). We focus on the concept of the Interpersonal meaning, specifically regarding the roles articulated in the studies by Delu (1991), Thompson and Thetela (1995), and in the Portuguese language such as Ramos (1997), Silva (2006) and Cabral (2009). Moreover, we ascribe van Leeuwen s (1997; 2003) theory of Representation of Social Actors as a theoretical framework in order to identify the sociological aspect of social actors represented in the students discourse. Within this scenario, the analysis unfolds on three levels: grammatical (pronouns), semantic (roles), and discursive (social actors). For the analysis of interpersonal realizations present in the students opinions, we use the computational program WordSmith Tools (SCOTT, 2010) and its applications Wordlist and Concord to quantify the occurrences of the pronouns I, You and They, which characterize the roles and social actors of the corpus. The results show that the students assigned the following roles to themselves: (i) apprentice to express their initial process of English language learning; (ii) freshman to reveal their choice of Major in Letters/English emphasis; (iii) future teacher to relate their expectations towards a practicing professional. To assign the roles to professors in the major, the students used the metaphor of modality (I think) to indicate the relationship of teacher training, while they are in the role of a student and as a future teacher. From these evidences the representation of the students as social actors emerges in roles such as: (i) active roles; (ii) passive roles and (iii) personalized roles. The social actors represented in the opinions of the students reflect the inclusion of these roles assigned to the actions expressed about their experiences and expectations derived from their teacher training classroom

Ethics in the flesh: formalizing moral values in embodied cognition

Values are beliefs or principles that are deemed significant or desirable within a specific society or culture, serving as the fundamental underpinnings for ethical and socio-behavioral norms. The objective of this research is to explore the domain encompassing moral, cultural, and individual values. To achieve this, we employ an ontological approach to formally represent the semantic relations within the value domain. The theoretical framework employed adopts Fillmore’s frame semantics, treating values as semantic frames. A value situation is thus characterized by the co-occurrence of specific semantic roles fulfilled within a given event or circumstance. Given the intricate semantics of values as abstract entities with high social capital, our investigation extends to two interconnected domains. The first domain is embodied cognition, specifically image schemas, which are cognitive patterns derived from sensorimotor experiences that shape our conceptualization of entities in the world. The second domain pertains to emotions, which are inherently intertwined with the realm of values. Consequently, our approach endeavors to formalize the semantics of values within an embodied cognition framework, recognizing values as emotional-laden semantic frames. The primary ontologies proposed in this work are: (i) ValueNet, an ontology network dedicated to the domain of values; (ii) ISAAC, the Image Schema Abstraction And Cognition ontology; and (iii) EmoNet, an ontology for theories of emotions. The knowledge formalization adheres to established modeling practices, including the reuse of semantic web resources such as WordNet, VerbNet, FrameNet, DBpedia, and alignment to foundational ontologies like DOLCE, as well as the utilization of Ontology Design Patterns. These ontological resources are operationalized through the development of a fully explainable frame-based detector capable of identifying values, emotions, and image schemas generating knowledge graphs from from natural language, leveraging the semantic dependencies of a sentence, and allowing non trivial higher layer knowledge inferences.

Semantic priming in Parkinson's disease: Evidence for delayed spreading activation

Nineteen persons with Parkinson's disease (PD) and 19 matched control participants completed a battery of online lexical decision tasks designed to isolate the automatic and attentional aspects of semantic activation within the semantic priming paradigm. Results highlighted key processing abnormalities in PD. Specifically, persons with PD exhibited a delayed time course of semantic activation. In addition, results suggest that experimental participants were unable to implicitly process prime information and, therefore, failed to engage strategic processing mechanisms in response to manipulations of the relatedness proportion. Results are discussed in terms of the 'Gain/Decay' hypothesis (Milberg, McGlinchey-Berroth, Duncan, & Higgins, 1999) and the dopaminergic modulation of signal to noise ratios in semantic networks.

Fostering e-participation sustainability through a BPM-driven semantic model

According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (2014), 68% of Europeans tend not to trust national governments. As the increasing alienation of citizens from politics endangers democracy and welfare, governments, practitioners and researchers look for innovative means to engage citizens in policy matters. One of the measures intended to overcome the so-called democratic deficit is the promotion of civic participation. Digital media proliferation offers a set of novel characteristics related to interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, social networking and inclusiveness that enable new forms of societal-wide collaboration with a potential impact on leveraging participative democracy. Following this trend, e-Participation is an emerging research area that consists in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to mediate and transform the relations among citizens and governments towards increasing citizens’ participation in public decision-making. However, despite the widespread efforts to implement e-Participation through research programs, new technologies and projects, exhaustive studies on the achieved outcomes reveal that it has not yet been successfully incorporated in institutional politics. Given the problems underlying e-Participation implementation, the present research suggested that, rather than project-oriented efforts, the cornerstone for successfully implementing e-Participation in public institutions as a sustainable added-value activity is a systematic organisational planning, embodying the principles of open-governance and open-engagement. It further suggested that BPM, as a management discipline, can act as a catalyst to enable the desired transformations towards value creation throughout the policy-making cycle, including political, organisational and, ultimately, citizen value. Following these findings, the primary objective of this research was to provide an instrumental model to foster e-Participation sustainability across Government and Public Administration towards a participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative democracy. The developed artefact, consisting in an e-Participation Organisational Semantic Model (ePOSM) underpinned by a BPM-steered approach, introduces this vision. This approach to e-Participation was modelled through a semi-formal lightweight ontology stack structured in four sub-ontologies, namely e-Participation Strategy, Organisational Units, Functions and Roles. The ePOSM facilitates e-Participation sustainability by: (1) Promoting a common and cross-functional understanding of the concepts underlying e-Participation implementation and of their articulation that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical users; (2) Providing an organisational model which allows a centralised and consistent roll-out of strategy-driven e-Participation initiatives, supported by operational units dedicated to the execution of transformation projects and participatory processes; (3) Providing a standardised organisational structure, goals, functions and roles related to e-Participation processes that enhances process-level interoperability among government agencies; (4) Providing a representation usable in software development for business processes’ automation, which allows advanced querying using a reasoner or inference engine to retrieve concrete and specific information about the e-Participation processes in place. An evaluation of the achieved outcomes, as well a comparative analysis with existent models, suggested that this innovative approach tackling the organisational planning dimension can constitute a stepping stone to harness e-Participation value.

Using qualia information to identify lexical semantic classes in an unsupervised clustering task

Acquiring lexical information is a complex problem, typically approached by relying on a number of contexts to contribute information for classification. One of the first issues to address in this domain is the determination of such contexts. The work presented here proposes the use of automatically obtained FORMAL role descriptors as features used to draw nouns from the same lexical semantic class together in an unsupervised clustering task. We have dealt with three lexical semantic classes (HUMAN, LOCATION and EVENT) in English. The results obtained show that it is possible to discriminate between elements from different lexical semantic classes using only FORMAL role information, hence validating our initial hypothesis. Also, iterating our method accurately accounts for fine-grained distinctions within lexical classes, namely distinctions involving ambiguous expressions. Moreover, a filtering and bootstrapping strategy employed in extracting FORMAL role descriptors proved to minimize effects of sparse data and noise in our task.

Auditory perceptual decision-making based on semantic categorization of environmental sounds.

Discriminating complex sounds relies on multiple stages of differential brain activity. The specific roles of these stages and their links to perception were the focus of the present study. We presented 250ms duration sounds of living and man-made objects while recording 160-channel electroencephalography (EEG). Subjects categorized each sound as that of a living, man-made or unknown item. We tested whether/when the brain discriminates between sound categories even when not transpiring behaviorally. We applied a single-trial classifier that identified voltage topographies and latencies at which brain responses are most discriminative. For sounds that the subjects could not categorize, we could successfully decode the semantic category based on differences in voltage topographies during the 116-174ms post-stimulus period. Sounds that were correctly categorized as that of a living or man-made item by the same subjects exhibited two periods of differences in voltage topographies at the single-trial level. Subjects exhibited differential activity before the sound ended (starting at 112ms) and on a separate period at ~270ms post-stimulus onset. Because each of these periods could be used to reliably decode semantic categories, we interpreted the first as being related to an implicit tuning for sound representations and the second as being linked to perceptual decision-making processes. Collectively, our results show that the brain discriminates environmental sounds during early stages and independently of behavioral proficiency and that explicit sound categorization requires a subsequent processing stage.

A Comparative Study of Two Semantic Systems: Body Russian and Russian Phraseology

Grigorij Kreidlin (Russia). A Comparative Study of Two Semantic Systems: Body Russian and Russian Phraseology. Mr. Kreidlin teaches in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the State University of Humanities in Moscow and worked on this project from August 1996 to July 1998. The classical approach to non-verbal and verbal oral communication is based on a traditional separation of body and mind. Linguists studied words and phrasemes, the products of mind activities, while gestures, facial expressions, postures and other forms of body language were left to anthropologists, psychologists, physiologists, and indeed to anyone but linguists. Only recently have linguists begun to turn their attention to gestures and semiotic and cognitive paradigms are now appearing that raise the question of designing an integral model for the unified description of non-verbal and verbal communicative behaviour. This project attempted to elaborate lexical and semantic fragments of such a model, producing a co-ordinated semantic description of the main Russian gestures (including gestures proper, postures and facial expressions) and their natural language analogues. The concept of emblematic gestures and gestural phrasemes and of their semantic links permitted an appropriate description of the transformation of a body as a purely physical substance into a body as a carrier of essential attributes of Russian culture - the semiotic process called the culturalisation of the human body. Here the human body embodies a system of cultural values and displays them in a text within the area of phraseology and some other important language domains. The goal of this research was to develop a theory that would account for the fundamental peculiarities of the process. The model proposed is based on the unified lexicographic representation of verbal and non-verbal units in the Dictionary of Russian Gestures, which the Mr. Kreidlin had earlier complied in collaboration with a group of his students. The Dictionary was originally oriented only towards reflecting how the lexical competence of Russian body language is represented in the Russian mind. Now a special type of phraseological zone has been designed to reflect explicitly semantic relationships between the gestures in the entries and phrasemes and to provide the necessary information for a detailed description of these. All the definitions, rules of usage and the established correlations are written in a semantic meta-language. Several classes of Russian gestural phrasemes were identified, including those phrasemes and idioms with semantic definitions close to those of the corresponding gestures, those phraseological units that have lost touch with the related gestures (although etymologically they are derived from gestures that have gone out of use), and phrasemes and idioms which have semantic traces or reflexes inherited from the meaning of the related gestures. The basic assumptions and practical considerations underlying the work were as follows. (1) To compare meanings one has to be able to state them. To state the meaning of a gesture or a phraseological expression, one needs a formal semantic meta-language of propositional character that represents the cognitive and mental aspects of the codes. (2) The semantic contrastive analysis of any semiotic codes used in person-to-person communication also requires a single semantic meta-language, i.e. a formal semantic language of description,. This language must be as linguistically and culturally independent as possible and yet must be open to interpretation through any culture and code. Another possible method of conducting comparative verbal-non-verbal semantic research is to work with different semantic meta-languages and semantic nets and to learn how to combine them, translate from one to another, etc. in order to reach a common basis for the subsequent comparison of units. (3) The practical work in defining phraseological units and organising the phraseological zone in the Dictionary of Russian Gestures unexpectedly showed that semantic links between gestures and gestural phrasemes are reflected not only in common semantic elements and syntactic structure of semantic propositions, but also in general and partial cognitive operations that are made over semantic definitions. (4) In comparative semantic analysis one should take into account different values and roles of inner form and image components in the semantic representation of non-verbal and verbal units. (5) For the most part, gestural phrasemes are direct semantic derivatives of gestures. The cognitive and formal techniques can be regarded as typological features for the future functional-semantic classification of gestural phrasemes: two phrasemes whose meaning can be obtained by the same cognitive or purely syntactic operations (or types of operations) over the meanings of the corresponding gestures, belong by definition to one and the same class. The nature of many cognitive operations has not been studied well so far, but the first steps towards its comprehension and description have been taken. The research identified 25 logically possible classes of relationships between a gesture and a gestural phraseme. The calculation is based on theoretically possible formal (set-theory) correlations between signifiers and signified of the non-verbal and verbal units. However, in order to examine which of them are realised in practice a complete semantic and lexicographic description of all (not only central) everyday emblems and gestural phrasemes is required and this unfortunately does not yet exist. Mr. Kreidlin suggests that the results of the comparative analysis of verbal and non-verbal units could also be used in other research areas such as the lexicography of emotions.