Workshop on Dimensions of Meaning: Distributional and Curated Semantics (2022)


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Proceedings of the Workshop on Dimensions of Meaning: Distributional and Curated Semantics (DistCurate 2022)

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Dimensions of Meaning: Distributional and Curated Semantics (DistCurate 2022)
Collin F. Baker

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A Descriptive Study of Metaphors and Frames in the Multilingual Shared Annotation Task
Maucha Gamonal

This work assumes that languages are structured by semantic frames, which are schematic representations of concepts. Metaphors, on the other hand, are cognitive projections between domains, which are the result of our interaction in the world, through experiences, expectations and human biology itself. In this work, we use both semantic frames and metaphors in multilingual contrast (Brazilian Portuguese, English and German). The aim is to present a descriptive study of metaphors and frames in the multilingual shared annotation task of Multilingual FrameNet, a task which consisted of using frames from Berkeley FrameNet to annotate a parallel corpora. The result shows parameters for cross-linguistic annotation considering frames and metaphors.

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Multi-sense Language Modelling
Andrea Lekkas | Peter Schneider-Kamp | Isabelle Augenstein

The effectiveness of a language model is influenced by its token representations, which must encode contextual information and handle the same word form having a plurality of meanings (polysemy). Currently, none of the common language modelling architectures explicitly model polysemy. We propose a language model which not only predicts the next word, but also its sense in context. We argue that this higher prediction granularity may be useful for end tasks such as assistive writing, and allow for more a precise linking of language models with knowledge bases. We find that multi-sense language modelling requires architectures that go beyond standard language models, and here propose a localized prediction framework that decomposes the task into a word followed by a sense prediction task. To aid sense prediction, we utilise a Graph Attention Network, which encodes definitions and example uses of word senses. Overall, we find that multi-sense language modelling is a highly challenging task, and suggest that future work focus on the creation of more annotated training datasets.

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Logical Story Representations via FrameNet + Semantic Parsing
Lane Lawley | Lenhart Schubert

We propose a means of augmenting FrameNet parsers with a formal logic parser to obtain rich semantic representations of events. These schematic representations of the frame events, which we call Episodic Logic (EL) schemas, abstract constants to variables, preserving their types and relationships to other individuals in the same text. Due to the temporal semantics of the chosen logical formalism, all identified schemas in a text are also assigned temporally bound “episodes” and related to one another in time. The semantic role information from the FrameNet frames is also incorporated into the schema’s type constraints. We describe an implementation of this method using a neural FrameNet parser, and discuss the approach’s possible applications to question answering and open-domain event schema learning.

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Comparing Distributional and Curated Approaches for Cross-lingual Frame Alignment
Collin F. Baker | Michael Ellsworth | Miriam R. L. Petruck | Arthur Lorenzi

Despite advances in statistical approaches to the modeling of meaning, many ques- tions about the ideal way of exploiting both knowledge-based (e.g., FrameNet, WordNet) and data-based methods (e.g., BERT) remain unresolved. This workshop focuses on these questions with three session papers that run the gamut from highly distributional methods (Lekkas et al., 2022), to highly curated methods (Gamonal, 2022), and techniques with statistical methods producing structured semantics (Lawley and Schubert, 2022). In addition, we begin the workshop with a small comparison of cross-lingual techniques for frame semantic alignment for one language pair (Spanish and English). None of the distributional techniques consistently aligns the 1-best frame match from English to Spanish, all failing in at least one case. Predicting which techniques will align which frames cross-linguistically is not possible from any known characteristic of the alignment technique or the frames. Although distributional techniques are a rich source of semantic information for many tasks, at present curated, knowledge-based semantics remains the only technique that can consistently align frames across languages.