LINGUIST List 17.17
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Tue Jan 10 2006
Qs: Thematic Roles Survey; Concrete Noun Hierarchy
Editor for this issue: Jessica Boynton
<jessica linguistlist.org>
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Directory
1. Brian
Murphy,
Online Survey on Thematic Roles
2. chris
daniel,
Concrete Noun Hierarchy
Message 1: Online Survey on Thematic Roles
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Date: 22-Dec-2005
From: Brian Murphy <Brian.Murphycs.tcd.ie>
Subject: Online Survey on Thematic Roles
Dear List, I'm looking for volunteers take part in a survey on the use of
thematic roles by linguists.
Description
Thematic roles (or theta roles or semantic roles, or what you will) are
widely appealed to in linguistics. There remain many disagreements on the
details of what roles to include in an inventory, and exactly how to define
them. However, their frequent use as a descriptive device, for example when
discussing syntactic constructions like the passive or the dative forms,
suggests there may be broad agreement on their meaning.
We would like to test this. We have assembled an arbitrary set of sentences
for linguists to annotate with role labels. We do not give any description
or definition of labels, since people's existing understanding of them is
part of what we are investigating.
If you are willing to participate, please click on this link and follow the
instructions you will find there:
https://www.cs.tcd.ie/Brian.Murphy/survey/
We realise the risks of doing what could be seen as psycholinguistic
research with linguists as informants. However, this exercise is primarily
intended to identify 'best practice' in linguistic description.
All submissions received before the 30th of January will be included in a
summary of results that we will post to the list.
Many Thanks and Regards,
Brian Murphy & Carl Vogel
Trinity College Dublin
Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
Psycholinguistics
Semantics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
Message 2: Concrete Noun Hierarchy
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Date: 21-Dec-2005
From: chris daniel <danielchriscomcast.net>
Subject: Concrete Noun Hierarchy
I am an LA based investment fund manager who is financing a Natural
Language Learning, Understanding and Generation Software System in which
all words are related semantically by verb primitive (use). I am in search
of individuals interested in helping construct one piece of the puzzle; a
Concrete Noun Hierarchy defined by SENSE. We are also interested in
speaking with someone who can point us to a resource that may offers such
information.
To date, we have:
-Built a complete verb hierarchy covering all of the verbs in English, each
of which is parented by simple-to- understand, frequently used verb
'primitives' (parent) such as push, pull, hold, have, put, take, feel,
believe, etc.
-Built adjective, abstract noun, adverb, preposition and other hierarchies;
each of which is parented by and related to one another uniformly using
these same primitives based on how we 'use' them or what action(s) they take.
-Begun to uniformly relate words semantically (by meaning as we 'use' them
in activities. For example: funerals (event) goes with mourner (role) and
casket (object) in cemetary (place)
The concrete noun hierarchy we have begun to construct is classified by
Type. Each type has been identified:
Examples from 'Vehicle' Typology, include:
-airplane: a vehicle that flies through the air, has wings, a tail and is
powered by an engine
-car: a vehicle that is driven on roads, has four wheels and is powered by
an engine
-boat: a vehicle that travels across water and is powered by an engine
-bicycle: a vehicle with two wheels that is ridden on roads and over ground
by pushing pedals
Anyone who is interested in collaborating on this project and/or who can
point us to a resource other than our present brute force, alphabetical
identification method of extracting words from dictionaries, is welcome to
email me.
At present, we work alphabetically through all nouns, extracting those that
are concrete, classifying each by SENSE, and redefining them using simple
to understand, frequently used words. This allows us to uniformly relate
all the words in Standard English.
Thank you.
Chris Daniel
Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
Semantics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
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