Lexical Semantics

1
Lexical Semantics

• Based on Slides by Jim Martin

2
Relations

• Paradigmatic relations
• Synonymy
• Antonymy
• Hyponymy
• Metonymy

3
WordNet

• WordNet is a database of such relations

4
WordNet Relations
5
WordNet Hierarchies
6
Inside Words

• Paradigmatic relations connect lexemes together
  in particular ways but dont say anything about
  what the meaning representation of a particular
  lexeme should consist of.
• Thats what I mean by inside word meanings.

7
Inside Words

• Various approaches have been followed to describe
  the semantics of lexemes. Well look at only a
  few
• Thematic roles in predicate-bearing lexemes
• Selection restrictions on thematic roles
• Decompositional semantics of predicates
• Feature-structures for nouns

8
Inside Words

• Thematic roles more on the stuff that goes on
  inside verbs.
• Thematic roles are semantic generalizations over
  the specific roles that occur with specific
  verbs.
• I.e. Takers, givers, eaters, makers, doers,
  killers, all have something in common
• -er
• Theyre all the agents of the actions
• We can generalize across other roles as well to
  come up with a small finite set of such roles

9
Thematic Roles
10
Thematic Role Examples
11
Examples

• So instead of
• Sally gave Harry a book.
• Giver(Sally)Givee(Harry)Given(book)
• Agent(Sally)Goal(Harry)Theme(book)
• What good does this do us?

12
Thematic Roles

• Takes some of the work away from the verbs.
• Its not the case that every verb is unique and
  has to completely specify how all of its
  arguments uniquely behave.
• Provides a locus for organizing semantic
  processing
• It permits us to distinguish near surface-level
  semantics from deeper semantics

13
Nonce Word examples

• Consider the following example
• He gimbled the frimgly to Mary.
• Who did it?
• What got gimbled?
• Who has the frimgly?
• HeAGENT gimbled the frimglyTHEME to
  MaryGOAL

14
Linking

• Thematic roles, syntactic categories and their
  positions in larger syntactic structures are all
  intertwined in complicated ways. For example
• AGENTS are often subjects
• In a VP-gtV NP NP rule, the first NP is often a
  GOAL and the second a THEME

15
Inference

• After a verb that expresses a transfer what can
  we conclude about the thing labeled THEME with
  respect to the thing labeled GOAL?

16
Deeper Semantics

• Honestly from the WSJ
• He melted her reserve with a husky-voiced paean
  to her eyes.
• If we label the constituents He and her reserve
  as the Melter and Melted, then those labels lose
  any meaning they might have had.
• If we make them Agent and Theme then we dont
  have the same problems

17
Problems

• What exactly is a role?
• Whats the right set of roles?
• Are such roles universals?
• Are these roles atomic?
• I.e. Agents
• Animate, Volitional, Direct causers, etc
• Can we automatically label syntactic constituents
  with thematic roles?

18
What about Nouns?
19
Selection Restrictions

• Back a few weeks
• I want to eat someplace near campus
• Now we can say that eat is a predicate that has
  an AGENT and a THEME
• And that the AGENT must be capable of eating and
  the THEME must be capable of being eaten

20
As Logical Statements

• For eat
• Eating(e) Agent(e,x) Theme(e,y)Isa(y, Food)
• (adding in all the right quantifiers and lambdas)

21
Back to WordNet

• Use WordNet hyponyms (type) to encode the
  selection restrictions

22
Specificity of Restrictions

• Consider the verbs imagine, lift and diagonalize
  in the following examples
• Imagine a tennis game
• Atlantis lifted Galileo from the pad
• To diagonalize a matrix is to find its
  eigenvalues
• What can you say about THEME in each with respect
  to the verb?
• Some will be high up in the WordNet hierarchy,
  others not so high

23
Problems

• Unfortunately, verbs are polysemous and language
  is creative WSJ examples
• ate glass on an empty stomach accompanied only
  by water and tea
• you cant eat gold for lunch if youre hungry
• get it to try to eat Afghanistan

24
Solutions

• Eat glass
• Not really a problem. It is actually about an
  eating event
• Eat gold
• Also about eating, and the cant creates a scope
  that permits the THEME to not be edible
• Eat Afghanistan
• This is harder, its not really about eating at all

25
Discovering the Restrictions

• Instead of hand-coding the restrictions for each
  verb, can we discover a verbs restrictions by
  using a corpus and WordNet?
• Parse sentences and find heads
• Label the thematic roles
• Collect statistics on the co-occurrence of
  particular headwords with particular thematic
  roles
• Use the WordNet hypernym structure to find the
  most meaningful level to use as a restriction

26
Motivation

• Find the lowest (most specific) common ancestor
  that covers a significant number of the examples