Several proposed steps for refining the frame element hierarchy have now been performed. At present, there are 1011 frame elements in the frame element digraph with 261 primitives (compared with an original 476 primitives), consisting of 202 primitives not used as hypernyms and 59 used as hypernyms in deriving 750 frame elements. The current hierarchy is more rigorous, so that it is possible to trace each frame element back to its primitive. This post describes the steps that have been taken thus far. (more…)

In a digraph analysis, links between nodes may give rise to strong components, i.e., nodes that are mutually reachable. In the frame element hierarchy, ten strong components (or circularities) have arisen. In an effort to provide a strict hierarchy for frame elements, these circularities need to be broken. In doing this, it is instructive to examine each one in detail.

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The Oxford Dictionary of English defines preposition as “a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause”.  A few years ago, Bill Dolan, quoting Lucy Vanderwende (both of the Microsoft NLP group), suggested that

prepositions are essentially just syntactic reflexes that have no real meaning of their own, only taking on meaning in the context of a larger syntactic pattern

More recently, Ed Hovy cited Jerry Hobbs that developing a hierarchy of semantic relations is

a fool’s errand; that each relationship between two different concepts is unique, and that one can produce some generalizations and a relation hierarchy, but you could never cover everything

Based on some recent work, I would like to put these opinions into some deeper context. (more…)

The main objectives of analyzing the frame element digraph, whose derivation was described in a previous post, are to identify the primitive frame elements and to show the derivational hierarchy of each of the other frame elements.  There are 1015 frame elements in the frame element dictionary. Based on the hypernym relationships, this yields a digraph of 1028 nodes with 476 primitives. (more…)