Search results for "Semantic Role"
showing 10 items of 13 documents
Space (Adpositions)
2014
Space (Cases)
2014
L'estrazione automatica dei ruoli semantici corradicali. The importance of being Cognate
2022
This study will introduce a tool – termed NLPYTALY – for the automatictreatment of naturally-occurring texts in Italian. The tool distinguishesconstructs with an ordinary verb from those with a support verb. Mean-ing is rendered by using cognate (i.e. etymologically related) semantic roles (CSR), which differ from other roles because they are expressed withthe content morpheme of the predicate licensing arguments. CSRs offer anumber of advantages: they can be semi-automatically derived and use the who-does-what model. Besides, they facilitate the detection of anaphoric chains and produce a foreground/background opposition of the namedentities. Finally, they permit the construction of a chro…
The hidden side of adverbs
2018
This paper will address the predicative nature of manner adverb(ial)s and of three types of sentence adverbs (subject-oriented, modal, and evaluative) in Italian. Predication often becomes overt by means of morphological correlates. Is it possible to find any such evidence with invariable adverbs? To unveil their predicative nature, a procedure will be suggested in which two sentences, one with a -mente adverb, the other with its cognate adjective (a) share the content morphemes (identity of the signifiant) and (b) entail each other (identity of the signifié as regards semantic roles). A number of such pairs will be discussed, examples of which include: Intelligentemente, Leo intervenne ‘Cl…
The zoom-on-possessee construction in Kam (Dong): the anatomy of a new construction type
2005
Kam, a Kadai language spoken in Guizhou province (People's Republic of China), has a family of intransitive possessive constructions with the word order ‘Possessor–Verb–Possessee’. (The basic word order in Kam is SV and AVO.) While two recent papers have featured this unique construction type for an array of other Southeast Asian languages, they fail to acknowledge its distinct semantic value in contrast to the related construction type ‘Possessee–Possessor–Verb’. The former construction type displays a so-called ‘zoom-effect’: the possessor is predicated IN, AT or THROUGH his/her/its possessee; the predication zooms from the possessor on his/her/its possessee. The latter construction, in c…
Machine-readable entailments with the Italian 'prendere' construction expressing hitting and insulting events
2022
The Italian language features a little debated transitive construction with prendere ‘to take/to catch’ in which a prepositional phrase (PP) with an adverbial value occurs mandatorily (e.g. Lui prese a pugni Leo ‘He punched Leo’). Semantically, this construction often implies the use of physical force or verbal offence. In the hitting or insulting event, the notional subject generally is a [+ Human] Agent, whilst the notional direct object generally is a [+ Animate] Affectee ([1]: 4). It can be contended that prendere, which carries no literal meaning, is zero-valent and that the predicate assigning semantic roles is the PP. A computational tool will be illustrated, …
Natural Language Inference in Ordinary and Support Verb Constructions
2020
The family of clause types known as 'support (or 'light') verb construction' (SVC) manifests a peculiar syntax-semantics interface if compared with ordinary verb constructions (OVC). If, in e.g. She laughed, the verb licenses an argument and assigns it a semantic role, syntacticians of every stripe nowadays agree that it is the noun laugh, in She gave a laugh, which fulfils the same function. The differences between the two types have been extensively discussed in the linguistics literature (systematic research started in the 1970s), less so in Computational Linguistics. This paper has two objectives. First, it will propose an innovative type of semantic role, which is termed Cognate Semant…
Meaning Extraction from Strappare Causatives in Italian
2021
The work targets a little-known causative construction of Italian whose causative verb is strappare ‘tear/extort/snatch’ (e.g. Ada strappò la confessione a Piero ‘Ada made Piero confess against his will’). In the active voice of this clause type, the subject, licensed by strappare, is invariably associated with the semantic role ‘Causer’ (as fare does in fare causatives, see [1]), whilst the post-verbal NP (e.g. confessione ‘confession’) is best analyzed as the predicate licensing the remaining syntactic function/s and the related semantic role/s. The NooJ grammar which the authors propose automatically extracts the meaning of strappare causatives by means of a novel type of semantic role. …
Measuring Meaning
2021
This study will present a tool designed for meaning extraction with monoclausal sentences in Italian. Its main features will be illustrated with instances of the Italian causative clause type featuring the verb fare ‘make’ (e.g. Egli fa piangere il bambino ‘He makes the child cry’), a construction which invariably embeds a clause (e.g.Il bambino piange ‘The child cries’) with which it establishes an entailment relationship. The tool automatically accomplishes the following tasks: it answers relevantwh- questions (e.g. Who cries? Who makes someone cry?) and detects the entailment. Concurrent with this presentation, this study will also encourage a reflection on the research currently being c…
Sentence Induced Transformations in Conceptual Spaces
2008
The proposed work illustrates how "primitive concepts" can be automatically induced from a text corpus. The primitive concepts are identified by the orthonormal axis of a "conceptual" space induced by a methodology inspired to the latent semantic analysis approach. The methodology represents a natural language sentence by means of a set of rotations of an orthonormal basis in the "conceptual"space. The rotations, triggered by the sequence of words composing the sentence and realized by means of geometric algebra rotors, allow to highlight "conceptual" relations that can arise among the primitive concepts.